THE GIRL WITH THE WINE BOTTLE

A former teenage runaway, who was immortalized in a Life magazine photo taken at the 1969 Woodstock music festival, shares her life story in this memoir.

In 1968, when Rogers-Whitworth was 15, she and her family moved to Georgia from Florida. She writes that she had gotten a “taste of the civilian life” in the Sunshine State, including smoking cannabis; her medical supply sergeant father was away in Vietnam at the time. After she was caught skipping school in her new hometown, “something just snapped in me,” she says, adding that “I felt like I was running for my life.” She soon hopped a bus to Atlanta, where she connected to the late-1960s hippie counterculture. This memoir details the author’s various hangouts and travels, which culminated in her attending the famed Woodstock event. There, the author, at the age of 16, worked the concession stand and was photographed holding a wine bottle by a Life photographer. The memoir goes on to cover Rogers-Whitworth’s return to the South, her two marriages and three children, her struggles with autoimmune disease, and her attendance at Woodstock’s 50th anniversary in 2019. “When I was young, I just learned to roll with whatever came my way,” notes Rogers-Whitworth at one point, and she clearly captures this feeling of free-wheeling existence in this rough stream-of-consciousness narrative, which largely focuses on her memories of the many people and incidents of the runaway period of her life. This memoir’s most compelling moments are when the author—who was intriguingly known as Peter Pan to some of her acid-taking friends—provides her readers with glimpses of the darker aspects of her story, as in a detailed sequence about a “nightmare date” in 1969 Atlanta with a “nutty boy” who she believed was a killer.

A raw and often engaging depiction of drifting into the hippie life.