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Hippie Chick

Coming of Age in the '60s

Published by She Writes Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

LIST PRICE ₹741.00

PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER

About The Book

In Hippie Chick, a rebellious teenager finds her mother dead in the bathroom. To save her from living alone with a difficult father, her older sister sends her a one-way plane ticket to leave New Jersey. Landing in San Francisco, she is thrust into a lifestyle way beyond what she is ready for, and that challenges all previous notions of how one behaves. It is 1963, and we are brought along as Ilene becomes immersed in the unfolding of the sixties during the earliest days of sexual freedom, psychedelic drugs, the jazz scene, and rock ’n’ roll. This is a deeply personal story of how one young woman manages to survive and even to thrive in the face of the whirlwind of experiences coming at her. It is filled with a rich tapestry of moments that run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous, and everything in between.

About The Author

Born in New Jersey as the youngest of six to a mother who was seriously ill, Ilene English became something of a lost child. In spite of this, she was a free spirit, her life fueled by an innate sense of optimism and determination. As a young woman, she became an early psychedelic pioneer, experimenting with LSD during a time when it was still legal and its effects were not yet fully comprehended. During the sixties, she, along with an entire community of fellow trippers, innocently thought that they could change the world into one that valued love over materialism through psychedelics. Today, years later, English is a licensed psychotherapist. Her life experience informs her work as a healer and a teacher. Hippie Chick is her first book.

Product Details

  • Publisher: She Writes Press (September 24, 2019)
  • Length: 344 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781631525872

Raves and Reviews

2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Best Cover Design (Non-Fiction)
2022 Book Excellence Awards Winner in Women’s Non-Fiction
2020 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards Silver Winner in Autobiography & Memoir

2020 Readers' Favorite Book Awards Silver Medal in Non-Fiction: Historical
2020 CIBA Journey Book Awards Finalist
2021 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Women's Issues (Non-Fiction)
2021 International Book Awards Finalist in Autobiography/Memoir

“To have lived all of this with such relish, loved and lost so many times, and emerged as someone centered in a career, happily married, with a grown daughter who loves her: that is something to be proud of and amazed by.”
—Mark Matousek, teacher and author of When You’re Falling, Dive

“Ilene English, a woman warrior with a wide-open heart, was already breaking racial and sexual taboos before the flowering of the counterculture. Her spare, candid style is the perfect vehicle to carry the reader from East Coast to West-Coast, traditional life to Bohemian freedom, and ultimately to the flowering of wisdom. I so enjoyed this book.”
—Peter Coyote, actor, author, and Zen Buddhist priest

“For those who remember the sixties—which began in the mid-1950s and didn’t end until the mid-1970s—and who think it was always groovy to be a ‘hippie chick,’ Ilene English’s new memoir will provide a rude awakening. This first-person narrative tells it like it was on the Farm in Tennessee; in Eugene, Oregon, a beehive of hippie activity; and on the hippie highway, which stretched from coast to coast. For those who want to experience, vicariously, a time when hippie chicks felt ‘juicy and sexy,’ as English says she felt, well, dig it, man.”
—Jonah Raskin, author of Rock and Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation

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