Hi, Hi, Miss American Pie

MISS AMERICAN PIE

A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s

By Margaret Sartor

Bloomsbury. 272 pp. $19.95

I've just finished reading the most amazing book. As I read it, I ranted and raved to my friends: "This thing is so amazing! I don't want it ever to stop!" Of course, I know I'll read it again but never in the same way. I'm in love with the characters, particularly the girl who writes the diary here, Margaret Sartor, a tough little tomboy of 12 who grows, over six years, into a thoughtful high school graduate on her way to the university and a much larger life. I love this little half-mad savage who lives with her decent, hardworking family right by a levee in a small Louisiana city in the early '70s and who sums up her days in sentences such as: "Sometimes I just want to take all the boys in my school and fry them in deep fat." Or, "Tried to smoke one of Daddy's El Trelles cigars but after two puffs I was ready to El Puke."

Margaret Sartor isn't trying to create a comic heroine; she is a comic heroine, real as snakes. All this is taken from her own diaries, written some 30 years ago when she was a scrabbly kid who opined, "I like Cliff but Pam told me he only likes whores," or "Mama and I got in a big fight. Kitten ran all over everywhere," or this, five years later: "I overheard my mother say to Aunt Lou that if she had had dogs before she'd had children, she might never have had children."

By then, we know the family well. There's the author's free-spirited, stoic mother, Bobbie Sue, who lives with her husband, Dr. Tom Sartor, in a nice house close to the levee on the banks of the Ouachita River in Montgomery, La. There are Margaret's two older sisters, Mary and Stella, and her younger brother, Bill. We know that when their fifth child, little Sara, appeared unexpectedly on the scene, the Sartors welcomed the new circumstances with aplomb and steady affection. And we know about Margaret, sizing up her place in the family hierarchy, determined not to be the runt of the litter in any way, trying to keep a precarious purchase on everything.

Sartor explains how "Miss American Pie" came into being in the introduction. A photographer and documentarian, she had recently completed a series of pictures depicting friends and family from her youth and was looking to caption them. She was back in her home town, staying at her parents' house, and happened to remember her childhood diaries. She went up into the attic, rummaged around and found them. She was in her forties at that time; her son was the same age she had been when she'd begun them.

The past revealed itself to her with Proustian intensity -- not just her own life but the lives of those around her: "In a town like Montgomery, children form bonds early and usually according to age, neighborhood, and how your family spends its free time," Sartor writes. "When I was growing up, loyalties shifted subtly from year to year, or sometimes week to week, but we were the same friends at eighteen that we were at age seven." She knows as well that most Americans form their primary myths of desire in high school, which is why so many of us marry aging (but still beautiful, in our eyes!) classmates after our 20th, 30th, 40th reunions.

After her introductory comments and before the actual diaries begin, the author lists the people who were important in her life three decades earlier. Amid a raft of young guys, there are Mitch, competitive and charming, and Jackson, whom every girl is in love with, but he puts Christ first. And there's her next-door neighbor Tommy, her best friend since they were toddlers. And she has her girlfriends: Pam, who excels in one-upmanship; Angela, her beloved cousin, who will major in home economics and marry a minister; and Betsy, a hyper-religious, chipper little honey who signs one of Margaret's valentines, "I'll see ya at the Rapture!"

The South, at the beginning of the '70s, was seeing a great resurgence of Protestant evangelism, but instead of telling us about it, Sartor stands back and lets us experience the surging and exhilarating emotion of it all: the fervent prayer meetings in living rooms, the weeping and embracing teenagers, the earnest adolescent strivings to apprehend the Divine. What a world she lived in then! Church and then water-skiing on the river and then staying up all night and making out with darling guys who tried to seduce and convert her at the same time. There were proms (her grandmother sewed her dresses) and cheerleading and marching and horseback riding and going out on dates and fighting and breaking up and driving out for breakfast at 6 in the morning.

The grown-ups are seen peripherally here: her staunch parents, the teachers who copped feels off their prettiest students, the youth minister who did the same. And the kids her own age are mysteries to her: the girls who may or may not be pregnant and the guy who may be gay. All the adults in this small world know about it, but his classmates are oblivious, until he lets it be known -- and then comes in for a hard dose of God's wrath.