American Nomad, A Generational Memoir (X Marks The Spot)

American Nomad is a raw unfinished story of a journey through three continents and five decades of change in the way people live, think, feel, and dream. Liz Farrow's life began in seventies California, filled with sun and surf; but she also experienced its underside: deprivation, dysfunction, and discrimination. Rebellion and escape attempts came through fashion, music, travel, new cultures, and various scenes: punk, raves, goth, drugs, and, more lastingly, religion and spirituality. She fetched up in the City of Hopeful Night, San Francisco, about to take off into new worlds of entertainment and empowering technology. She played her own part in its live music scene, working for the legendary Bill Graham Presents and enjoying many close encounters with her favorite musicians, including the Cocteau Twins and Joe Strummer of The Clash. Reflecting on the seminal, and once again fashionable, decade of the nineties, she identifies herself as part of the last "Generation Real," known as Generation X, who had to achieve their dreams in the physical world before the Internet took over - a generation drawn to extremes. Whether it's the stark, endless desert or the infinite vastness of the ocean, that same passion for intensity shows in her love for 'extreme' music and fashion-such as post-punk and all things bold-which further captures that dynamic and adventurous spirit.

In this century, Liz became a literal nomad. She combined a London-based media career at the BBC with explorations in North Africa and the Middle East. From childhood, she felt a constant urge to escape, banging her head against the walls at home, at school and later in the office struggling to fit in. A deep thinker, always seeking adventure, always questioning and asking why, she did not yet know she was neurodivergent. She ends on a message of hope. Whatever life throws up in problems and demands, memory gives one the power to revive dreams and reconnect with the person who dreamed them. Enriched with her own photographs, Liz Farrow's American Nomad will recapture many memories for older readers and introduce younger ones to the world which shaped their lives.

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Publisher: Liz Farrow

ISBN: 9781919464404