Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods by Sarah Neidhardt has been reviewed in Westworld.
“For those who are granola right down to their toes (and those who survived parents like that). The memoir Twenty Acres from Colorado-born author Sarah Neidhardt recounts her family’s move from Colorado Springs to the isolated wilds of the Arkansas Ozarks, where they pioneered a homestead in bohemian counterculture style. Whether you lived in a yurt or just had to trade chocolate for carob now and then, any child of the ’70s will recognize themselves in this book.”
—Teague Bohlen, Westworld, “Colorado Books for Holiday Gift Giving”
Sarah Neidhardt was an infant when her parents joined the growing back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. Uprooting their young family to move from Colorado Springs to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, they built a cabin, grew their own food, and for years strove to escape their former lives and achieve an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency.
In Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods, bohemian counterculture meets pioneer homemaking. Neidhardt revisits her childhood with compassion and candor, drawing upon a trove of family letters to retrace her parents’ journey from their affluent youths, to their embrace of rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society. As she comes to better understand her family and the movement that shaped them, Neidhardt reveals both the treasures and tolls of an unconventional, pastoral life.
Sarah Neidhardt has worked as a bookseller, secretary, paralegal, copyeditor, and stay-at-home mother. She grew up in Arkansas and Northern California and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and teenage son. She is a graduate of Oberlin College.