Silicon Valley Girl: My Adolescent Life and Times, and an Ode to Generation X

Inspired by the life and works of poet Sylvia Plath, including Plath's published journals, Maya Morrow presents her own coming-of-age journey in this collection of raw and uncensored diaries spanning a decade and a half. The story begins Christmas 1984 and ends in 1999, when the author, twenty-six, rediscovers the handwritten diaries for the first time.

"These diaries are compelling enough on their own," Morrow writes. "However, what makes this coming-of-age story different from many others is that it gives the reader a glimpse of not just an average, American middle class girl's life - it highlights the fact that my life was that, and I'm Afro American. When The Cosby Show came on, I saw my family on television, and didn't understand why the media said the show was an unrealistic depiction of African American life. It was realistic; it was my life!"

Set against a backdrop of cultural touchstones any Gen-Xer would recognize, Silicon Valley Girl: My Adolescent Life and Times, and an Ode to Generation X offers a deeply personal look at the emotional life of a teenager of color trying to make sense of race, class, and sexuality at the dawn of Post-Cold War America.

About the Author

Maya Morrow was born in San Jose, California to two mathematicians who had fled the segregated, civil rights-era South to create a new life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Safe within the cocoon of her middle class surroundings--both parents had long careers in technology-she understood both parents' emphasis on the importance of formal education and reading books, choosing instead to test the boundaries of her very structured, controlled environment and cultivate her rebellious and adventurous nature. "I've always expressed myself by writing, for as long as I can remember," Morrow says. Her first published book is the brutally honest, autobiographical coming-of-age work titled Silicon Valley Girl: My Adolescent Life and Times, and an Ode to Generation X.