Publisher's Synopsis
With quick wit and searing honesty, The Ripening, a compelling memoir-in-essays, plunges into love, loss, long-term marriage, and aging in a youth-centric culture while exploring how a self gets created over time.
Driven by grief into early promiscuity at the tender age of twelve by her father's untimely death, Nancy London takes us into dim Greenwich Village bars with a fake ID, into the back seats of cars with older men, to late night concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and eventually on a transformative journey to the mountains of Oaxaca where a steady diet of psilocybin mushrooms sets her on her path seeking a teacher of love. She enters a clandestine sexual relationship with a New Age guru, but when her teacher becomes abusive, it takes a solo 48-hour full-moon LSD journey on a tropical island to reclaim her power and heal from the grief of losing a parent as a young girl.