Childhood in a tune-in, drop-out era

A recollection of traumatic experiences helps to share the wisdom gained from life’s struggles

“Tune in, turn on, and drop out.” Timothy Leary’s famous proposition for the counterculture had substantial room for abuse despite the utopian promise.

In an eloquent, stranger-than-fiction memoir, Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary, Vancouver’s Sonja Larsen recollects her traumatic experiences with one version of dropping out.

Larsen begins with a list of packed items: a teddy bear, homemade granola, a sleeping bag. Just 8 years old, she’s leaving the Sweetgrass commune in rural Quebec. Travelling with Dale, a homesick America draft evader, she’s hitchhiking to California; the plan is for her parents to follow later. At another commune they’ll live off the land. Arriving, Sonja finds a stricken landscape “all the shades of a rattlesnake.”

“I could see even then that there were people who could only learn things the hard way. People like us,” Larsen states.

Her childhood and adolescence definitely counts as “the hard way.” She routinely returns to her father and his garbage bags of marijuana in Montreal (the diametrical opposite of a helicopter parent, he writes her a letter that concludes with “It must be amazing to be nine years old and have so many options.”). She also spends time with her mother, who converts to a zealous form of communism “dedicated to building a second Amer- ican revolution” and has a boyfriend with sexual interests in her preteen daughter.

Young Sonja’s told that after the revolution everything will be different; it takes her many years to see past the rhetoric.

By 1981, she’s “an angry and lipsticked sixteen-year-old” residing in a rundown Brooklyn brownstone that houses a radical branch of the Communist Party USA. Between typing, recruiting and quoting Marx and Lenin, she’s preparing for the revolution — expected on Feb. 18, 1984.

For a time, she’s enthralled by the Old Man, the charismatic and messianic de facto leader whose violence, brainwashing techniques and sexual appetites recall other cult leaders, including Charles Manson and Jim Jones.

Soon, she, too, is in the military faction and asked to shed blood.

In a thoughtful and poignant concluding section set “years after the revolution,” Larsen outlines the consequences of her childhood. A veteran soldier, she’s survived the ordeal and can now share the wisdom gained from the experience. Brett Josef Grubisic lives in Vancouver and teaches at UBC. His third novel, From Up River, and For One Night Only, will be published in the spring.