The Year We Danced: A Memoir

With the number of Covid cases increasing and the death toll steadily rising, award-winning writer Stephen E. Smith decided it was appropriate-maybe even necessary-to write about happier, less stressful times.

In a box of forgotten files, he rediscovered loose-leaf binders and keepsakes from his first year of college. It had been more than half a century but reading through his course notes, personal observations, and the clippings he’d torn from magazines and newspapers, he pieced together the events, good and bad, tender and tragic, that shaped his freshman year.

Much of what he writes is disarmingly funny, but recalling the Civil Rights Movement, the War in Vietnam, and the complexities of finding himself a stranger in the South forced him to reassess a period of his life he’d long recalled as carefree. In this vivid and poignant mid-60s memoir, readers come to understand how friendship, a love of language and music, and the bittersweet remembrance of lost love can help sustain us through difficult times.