Excerpt from In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Marie's diaries reveal the preoccupations of most teenage girls: a close observation of who sat next to whom on the school bus, endless deliberation on the meaning of a particular boy's glance or greeting, and the urgent need to reject the red dresses with Peter Pan collars that her mother chose for her.

January 2, 1969. Everyone is wearing pants. I've got to talk Mommy into letting me do it, for honor's sake. I'm not sure I want to but I must.

A few days later, fashion interfered with her ability to play the French horn in the school band.

January 6, 1969. Wore pants. Blue dungaree bell bottoms. Hard playing instrument, pants are so tight.

By late spring, all the girls were wearing shorts to high school.

May 28, 1969. Today I went to HS in shorts. So did everyone else. But mine were v short and v tight. Wore a vest and sandals too. When we got back was mommy mad. We had a mother-to-daughter talk about why I was doing this. She told me how provocative I looked.

Provocative was, of course, exactly the point. Marie was trying to attract the attention of a boy called Jeff, and her parents, especially her father, were getting in her way. Despite the fact that Bill was politically progressive, his views on family remained traditional. He was the breadwinner and—as the man of the house—exempted from the chores everyone else had to do. Although he supported his daughters' academic ambitions, he had little time for the women's liberation movement that was beginning to influence the protest culture of the time. Chafing against the limits he imposed, Marie had an unerring instinct for what would anger him most. "The confrontations started when she was around twelve," Rosemarie remembers. "Marie knew how to push his buttons." Mass on Sunday at St. Dominic Roman Catholic Church was a ritual for the Colvin family, and no excuse for absence other than serious illness was accepted. Still, the Colvins were usually late arriving because Bill and Marie had fought about what she was wearing. Rebellion gave her a certain satisfaction.

June 8, 1969. To church. Wore mini. The mother and the father no like.

Marie, who had received her first Holy Communion some years earlier, tried to get God on her side, offering Him her record collection and pledging to say an act of contrition every night if He made Jeff like her. "Hope it works," she wrote. (It didn't.) She worried that she was taller than most boys and that other girls were slimmer and prettier. In fact, she was growing increasingly attractive, with green eyes; pale, clear skin that tanned easily in summer; an even mouth; and long, curly curtains of hair like Carole King, one of the folk-rock singers she and her friends had come to love. But sometimes she couldn't fathom her own feelings. She knew she was cleverer than the boys, yet she longed for their attention. She relished the feeling of vanquishing her father when she outran him in races around the house in the wet grass—yet as much as she wanted to defy him, she also craved his approval. If a boy misbehaved in school, his punishment was to go stand with the girls—as if that were the ultimate degradation. It was hard to make sense of it all.

* * *

Marie's diaries reveal a vivacious, intelligent, funny girl excited by the world around her. She read Tolkien; bought the albums of Steppenwolf, John and Yoko, and the musical Hair; trained the dog to sit; fibbed about coming in second in an athletics meet when in fact she was unplaced; and joined the rest of America in collective excitement about the space program.

March 12, 1969. Apollo still in orbit, splashdown tomorrow. We may be on the moon in May!

In the summer of 1969, she learned to sail, a pastime that would be a passion all her life.

July 16, 1969. I had the tiller most of the day. Did OK. The wind was great and we kept heeling—going really fast in the Sound.

Excerpted from In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum. Copyright © 2018 by Lindsey Hilsum. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.