Writer reveals personal history Mainer pens gritty tale of teen years

If you were to meet up with your old self, your teenage self, what would you say?

Would you be disappointed? Appalled? Surprised? Would you approve of the drugs, the drinking, the sex? Or would you look the other way?

In her memoir “Expecting to Fly,” Northeast Harbor author Martha Dudman looks her past straight in the eyes.

“I am you,” she writes. “I’m you in thirty years. I’m you grown up and disappointed by the disappointments of life. I’m you after all the drugs and the adventures. I’m you after all the craziness is past. I’m you with what you left me.”

In a jarring scene from the book, Dudman – a mother, grandmother, professional fund-raiser and bank board member who exercises regularly, rises at 4 a.m., wears suits, and served as past president of the Bangor noontime Rotary – confronts herself as an 18-year-old student at Antioch College, stoned, barefoot, on her way to a party at 2 a.m. They’re the same person. And they’re not. They can’t stand each other. They don’t get each other.

“You have your wild teenage years, and in the ’60s there was a lot of stuff going on,” Dudman said during a recent interview. “We weren’t just adolescents acting out. We were part of a movement that was taking place. But you move beyond that, get a job, have kids, join the Rotary. You’re living in the world as a grown-up person. You just don’t think about it.”

For a long time, Dudman didn’t think about it. Didn’t think about her free-loving, tripping, school-skipping days. Didn’t think about campaigning for Eugene McCarthy or protesting the bombing of Cambodia. She was a grown-up. Married. Divorced. Raising two kids. Working full-time. Then her daughter started taking drugs.

Dudman chronicled her daughter’s descent into drug abuse and her fight to come back in the critically acclaimed “Augusta, Gone.” After it was published, a woman whose son was in rehab came up to Dudman in the grocery store and told her, “Your book put into words what I’m feeling.” And that mother wasn’t alone.

“It was a remarkable experience,” Dudman said of the book’s success. “It was wonderful in many ways. It brought my daughter and I very close. It enabled us to talk and put things out there in a way that we might not have, were it not for the book.”

Writing “Augusta, Gone” also made her face her own wild days. In a way, she understood why her daughter was attracted to drugs and sex and drinking. But Dudman was the parent now.

“Am I just a hypocrite?” she asked. “Children almost force you to think about who you are and who you were and are those two the same person. Have you betrayed your past or were you just being an idiot? Are you proud of that? How do you reconcile that?”

For Dudman, the reconciliation is brutally honest, raw, and real. Her conversational prose is neither self-indulgent nor self-aggrandizing. She exposes things that most people would prefer to keep shrouded – her expulsion from a tony Washington-area school for smoking a joint in the amphitheater, a few awkward sexual experiences, and a particularly graphic moment in Spain.

“It is very gritty. I think parts of it are very disturbing. I also think parts of it are hilarious. We all have secrets. They’re different secrets, but we all have secrets that make us feel embarrassed or shameful,” Dudman said. “If one person in the room stands up and tells stuff, I think it frees everyone else in the room.”

It wasn’t an easy story to tell, but it wasn’t the secrets that got her. It was most difficult for her to re-live her father’s capture in Cambodia. At the time, Richard Dudman was working as a war correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and he and two other reporters were abducted at a checkpoint. He returned to Washington several months later, sick but safe.

“That was a very hard time,” Martha said.

Her teenage years were a hard time for her parents, as well. Her mother, Helen, was fraught with worry when Martha came home late every night. Her father took her out for a boat ride one summer in Maine and voiced his concerns about her drug use, which young Martha met with disdain. When they read their daughter’s manuscript last fall, “they were kind of squirmy,” Martha says. But they gave her their blessing.

“My mother understood it was going to be a tough book. She said, ‘Write what you’re going to write. Don’t hold back. Tell the whole story,'” Dudman said. “They’re very supportive. They’re very proud. My dad was a very courageous correspondent. … I was raised with that experience. You tell the truth. You tell the tough stories.”

Though Dudman’s story is “extreme,” she says, it touches on the history of an entire generation – of a charged time, when American culture was in the midst of a monumental transformation. She was going through the usual teenage stuff, the angst, the experimentation, the curiosity. She and her friends weren’t just taking drugs or having sex, they believed they were engaging in self-discovery. They knew they were a part of something larger.

“There was a shift that really touched every part of life,” Dudman said. “It really split the population into those that were trying out all these new things happening in the world and the ones that wanted to keep things the way they were. It was an amazing time.”

Dudman sees parallels between then and now – a feeling of disconnect between the government and the public, the war on terrorism, the moral and political debate over gay marriage. “There’s a surge of, not exactly a revolution, but there’s just kind of a time when a lot of stuff happens,” Dudman says. The ’60s won’t happen again, but there will be a time like it, and it will shape another generation, she says.

As for Dudman, she has met that decade head-on, and she has reconciled most of it in “Expecting to Fly.” There are things about her past that she can’t condone, and there are parts that still are embarrassing, but she has a better understanding of herself and the times that shaped her.

“It was extremely exciting and you did feel like you were in this big club,” Dudman said. “There was a feeling that we were a part of something, and you’re so hungry for that at that age, something good, something positive.”

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 or kandresen@bangordailynews.net.