CONFESSIONS

A woman recounts her journey from rock manager to hospice worker in this debut memoir.

Condon moved to San Francisco in 1974, an Irish Catholic girl from Kentucky just a few years out of college, obsessed with the Beatles and Janis Joplin. “I stuffed huge gobs of living into my days and nights,” she writes of her early years in the Bay Area. “I was a bumper car, careening from encounter to encounter. I was like the Terminator, letting nothing derail me from my explorations. My curiosity was as broad as the Mississippi and as open as the plains I had left behind.” There, she fell in with what was still a very exciting arts scene, and soon—via a relationship with successful songwriter Nick “the Greek” Gravenites—entered the world of music management. Before long, she was hobnobbing with members of the Band and Jefferson Airplane and a then-unknown Huey Lewis. She styled herself “the Godmother of Rock” and eventually formed her own Bay Area music festival, Nadine’s Wild Weekend. Her success in the business made it all the more surprising when she decided to make a career switch and start a nonprofit hospice program. This meandering memoir recollects her adventures in both fields as well as her lifelong search for spirituality and fulfillment (and the many bumps and losses she experienced along the way). Condon’s prose is lively and exuberant, as here where she describes walking onstage during her inaugural festival: “I was standing on that hallowed altar—the stage of the historical Fillmore Auditorium. I looked out across a sea of happy, anticipatory faces, yelling my name. ‘Nayyyyyyydine. Nadeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen.’ Nadine’s Wild Weekend was in full bloom.” While not exactly typical, Condon’s experience epitomizes a certain strand of baby boomer journey, from rebellious youth to “wisdom” keeper (as a late chapter puts it). One remarkable arc of the memoir involves the author revisiting a sexual assault she experienced in college in light of the #MeToo movement. Fans of San Francisco’s rock scene will particularly enjoy this book.

An engaging but rambling boomer account about maturity and the search for enlightenment.