It is 1971. You are twenty, standing poised at the edge of the rest of your life. You are intelligent and thoughtful, and everyone who knows you recognizes both wisdom and strength beyond your years. But your world has been shattered - twice. At fifteen, the shock of catching your mother with a man who was not your father blindsided you. At nineteen, you watched your countrymen - the National Guard - fire shots that killed four of your fellow Kent State University classmates as they protested the war in Vietnam. Yet even as gloom tempts you to succumb to the shadows of a deeply wooded forest, you persist in the hope of an open night sky.

It is now over fifty years since that protest in Ohio ultimately changed the tide of the Vietnam War. Van Buren's memoir is about how her life was affected when she witnessed the shootings there. It is a story of a generation - race relations and the white middle class of the 60's, drugs and the counterculture in the 70's, and then, closer to home in the 80's and 90's, marriage, divorce, depression and her mom's extramarital affair that lasted forty years. But in the end, In the Pillared Dark is about how, through all 50 years of growing up, persistence and hope never died.

Woven with humor and a variety of references to literature and music, Van Buren's writing moves at a fast pace with a dynamic mix of narrative and dialogue. It waxes philosophic without lapsing into tedium, and readers soon become immersed in the realization that they are looking into the mirror of their own lives through the memories of another.