Lucille Lang Day has quite a story to tell.
It comes across in her 2012 book, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, and it comes across in a video interview just posted on Walnut Creek TV.
In the video interview with Pete Crooks at the Walnut Creek Library, Day tells her tale of juvenile delinquency in the 1960s East Bay leading to marriage at 14, a baby at 15 and divorce at 16. Day, who grew up in Piedmont, and her first husband Mark, who grew up in Pleasant Hill, met at the former Al's Drive-in in Walnut Creek.
Day says she was inspired by the romance in movie musicals like Sayonara and South Pacific to get married and escape an abusive home. She said she wrote the book to "upend stereotypes" about how delinquency necessarily leads to someone becoming an adult criminal. "Juvenile delinquents and teen mothers are redeemable," she says.
Day has been a poet, science writer and founder of a small press. Now married to Richard Michael Levine in Oakland, she is the mother of two grown daughters and the grandmother of four.
Here's a Huffington Post review of the book.
