An account of that special, pivotal time in a person's life when innocence is lost and another road taken.

John Bowers joins of an oddball group of young men trying to become writers in Marshall, Illinois. Bowers leaves the love of his life in Tennesee and arrives at the Colony.

He gets a barracks-like room, hot Jell-O and cottage cheese, but no newspapers, radio or women allowed. He visits sporting houses in Terre Haute, gets his head beat in by a mad fellow colonist and takes a hallucinatory cross-country trip during which he meets a disheveled Montgomery Clift, who's about to star in From Here to Eternity

Back in Marshall, Normal Mailer comes to call. Memoral characters and surprises abound. Bowers writes a novel that is never published, and learns that all the freedom he has dreamed of may not compare with all he has lost

John Bowers' memoir of sexual yearning and thwarted passions incorporates scenes of piercing truth. He writes from his soul -- uncliched tales of children's first "sex shows" -- performed for a nickel in the barn -- car seat clinches and the poignancy of a life-long love, denied. His love of the past, his birth place and his first girlfriends will entertain even as they tear at one's heart. By the time John Bowers holds his first sweetheart's baby in his arms, the reader will feel the power and the poignancy of the journey which led John to seek love and his place in the literary world so far from home. his book is a tender and mature follow up to John Bowers' first acclaimed memoir, The Colony.