Essay Questions

Is Susie happy to see Dennie back at home?

At first, Susie is incredibly excited to see Dennie home. After all, she has missed her sister and she has also suffered from her absence in that in an attempt to prevent her from wanting to run away too her parents have come down doubly hard on her and she is suffering from a lack of freedom or room to breathe. She believes that now her sister is back, they will see that it is possible to veer off the rails and still make it back okay. There is hope for a more lenient lifestyle. She is also happy to have a confidante back, a sister to talk to and who will share her feelings about their parents.

Susie learns that having Dennie home is not like having her sister back; it is morel like having an additional parent because Dennie is taking her cues from their parents about Susie and is also looking for her stash of pills and trying to curb her drug use. She seems to Susie to have had the benefit of being able to run away and enjoy a hippie lifestyle, but is now telling Susie that this is not something that she should do herself. Susie does not want to live vicariously through Dennie, whom she sees as something of a hypocrite, and wants to experience life herself. She is angered by the way in which her sister is welcomed as the returning prodigal daughter whilst their parents find more and more fault with her in comparison.

How do the media portray the hippie life and why does Dennie feel that this is inaccurate?

Dennie feels that the hippie life she sees on the television and the life she experienced living in a community with other hippies are greatly different. There is a rose-colored tint on the media's portrayal of hippies. The media show the counter culture to be one that is based on an intellectual approach to life; one that involves free love, free thought and free access to hallucinogens that also free the mind. There is a suggestion that a community of hippies are fueled by love, find day to day life pleasurable and easy and that they are not constrained by the usual stresses and strains that afflict the rest of society.

In reality, Dennie feels that this is not the way that her life has been. She lacks basic comforts and necessities. She is filthy, and has to wash her feet in the family's pool when she gets home because there has been no facility for her to do so anywhere else. She is constantly high and her experiences have been getting worse and worse. She is used by multiple men for sex under the guise of "free love". She is also hungry with no way to support herself other than by begging. There is not as much dancing, laughing or wearing of flowers as the media has led her to believe; life as a hippie is difficult and can be just as brutal as life within the confines of suburban expectation.