If You Could've Seen What I Seen

In If You Could've Seen What I Seen, the Liz character of The Wind Blows on Maui, the writer's first book, is quite changed. By the 1960s, during the Vietnam War era, the time of the book, Liz has taken as a "double" (or alter-ego) a soldier on the run from the war whose words are the words in the title. The "double" also becomes a metaphor for both the War in Vietnam and the wars at home--e.g., all the chaos of the Civil Rights movement--and the wars going on inside Liz herself as she interacts with and negotiates the drugs, sex, and cheap thrills world of people her age at that time in Claremont, CA, Berkeley, and Washington, DC. All of the action is seen from Liz's point of view, but she never speaks in the book because she's too locked inside her own internal world. But, paradoxically, by the end of the book, she has also come to see that language is the key to understanding much of the confusion around her and inside her.