Editor’s Note: Sheila Weller is currently on the road promoting her book Girls Like Us. She is a New York Times bestselling author, a senior contributing editor at Glamour and a contributor to Vanity Fair.

In her New York Times Sunday review of my new book Girls Like Us: Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (which has been on the Times Bestseller list each of the three weeks it’s been out and is a Times Critic’s Choice), Stephanie Zacharek started off by sarcastically reviewing my dedication: “To the women of the 1960s generation. (Were we not the best?)” She said, “If that’s the sort of thing that gets you all hepped up to pour a glass of chardonnay and order some gauzy embroidered tunics and Clarks sandals from the Soft Surroundings catalogue, then you go, girl!” Well, I’ve never heard of Soft Surroundings or Clarks sandals, though I do drink a lot of white wine. When I summon the ‘60s I shared with my close girlfriends back then, I half-shudderingly think (hence the clubbiness in the dedication): Holy shit. It’s a miracle we didn’t wind up in some prison cell somewhere.

Those years, the late ‘60s to the early ‘70s, were like parentheses, an out-of-time (if not out-of-body) time: We were middle-class girls before it, and we went back to being middle-class young women afterward. But for a magically crazy, sense-heightened post-college chapter, the entire point was to be not-middle-class. We were little windmill tilters — first in our Paraphernalia miniskirts and then in our diaphanous long skirts, long hair, long shawls. It’s so long ago now, and we’ve been boring to our kids for so long, maybe it’s safe to go back into the mind’s steamer trunk and pull out those days.

I came to New York from UC Berkeley in 1967 and, like Carly Simon had with her decadent English boyfriend Willie Donaldson, I went right for what I call the “dark corrective” to my wholesome college boyfriend: a dashing, seeringly ironic older man in a trench coat who had "seen it all" and who made me, a high school cheerleader, feel that I had, too. He — H — was a fixture at Max’s Kansas City bar, a theatrical, self-mockingly sensual figure who had seduced Norman Mailer’s wives and whose previous girlfriend had just married Timothy Leary. I spent — yikes — two years of my life with this dude. He took me to loft parties (which he crashed, with an entourage) and to 55 on Christopher Street, a rat hole where literate drunks still muttered Beat poetry. Fidelity? Forget it. Married? Of course! But when I heard "Mr. Bojangles" and Laura Nyro’s "Timer," it described him, and that is what I wanted. Because he sensed it would make him seem more compelling, he told me that he’d once been a prostitute to make money for his family, a probable fiction but one that was ratified by the darkly urbane bravura he displayed at Max’s and the loft parties; anyone from those years there would remember H. When I interviewed the girlfriend of the psychopathic, charismatic surfer king Miki Dora a couple of years ago, she was reluctant to talk because, she said, “It’s just so embarrassing to me now that I was ever his girlfriend.” I knew exactly what she meant.