It's About Time — a memoir for the Baby Boom generation
A story of two lives, one street, and the decades that shaped a generation. Between 1946 and 1964, seventy-six million babies were born in the United States — the largest generation the country had ever produced. They changed everything. Not because they were smarter or braver, but because of when they arrived.
Born into one world. They lived to see it become another.
Who We Are traces two parallel lives — his and hers — through every decade from the Forties through today, weaving personal milestones with the history that shaped a generation. From Kennedy's inauguration to the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the birth control pill to the glass ceiling, this is the story of how we became who we are.
Two children come home from the hospital on the same June day in 1949. One in a blue blanket, one in a pink. They grow up two doors apart on the same suburban street. They share the same schools, the same television shows, the same Cold War drills, the same Beatles albums. But they are growing up in two completely different countries.
His path was narrow — but it was clear. He came home to a house where his future was assumed. He would grow up, get educated, find a career, support a family. Every institution in America was organized to keep him on that path. He didn't stay on it — not entirely. Nobody in his generation did.
She was building the road while she walked it. She came home to a world that had already decided what she would become. Every door she opened had been locked the day before. Every seat she took had been reserved for someone else. Her story doesn't run alongside his as a footnote. It runs alongside his as an equal narrative — because that is what it always was.
It's going to make you smell your mother's kitchen. It's going to make you hear a screen door slam in 1958. It's going to make you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot — and when Armstrong walked.
He wrote the "Who Am I" poem at the heart of this book in 2001. It sat in a drawer for twenty-three years. This book is his answer to that whisper.
David D. Doda was born on June 9, 1949, in New Haven, Connecticut — one of seventy-six million. He grew up in the postwar suburbs of Derby, Connecticut, surfed Manasquan at thirteen, captained his high school football team, played tight end at Wake Forest on the 1970 ACC championship squad, and earned a Ph.D. in Physics before spending fifteen years in the defense industry.
Who We Are is the book he didn't know he was writing for two decades. Now, with the perspective of seven full decades and a farmhouse in Brookfield, Vermont, he tells the story he was always meant to tell — not just his, but ours.