Jane Vandenburgh’s eventful childhood went spectacularly awry as her mother became increasingly unstable and her father—repeatedly arrested in gay bars—committed suicide. Jane was then raised by an aunt and uncle with four kids and issues of their own. From this background, this coming-of-age story is launched.

This was L.A. in the 1950s. The author’s parents—each self consciously nonconformist—had met at Cal and had set out to be Bohemians, but were now increasingly caught up in suburban nightmare that was billing itself as the American dream.

Her father, placed in the mental hospital to be “cured” of his homosexuality, committed suicide when the author was nine. Her mother too was institutionalized. Jane was then raised by an aunt and uncle who inherited the Vandenburgh kids though they already had four children of their own.

This is a coming of age story that is lived against the backdrop of dramatic social change, as the manners and mores that controlled the sexaul behavior of both men and women were being forever changed. It’s a tale of events so remarkable they all but decreed that the girl who lived them would become a writer.

"It's a rare pleasure to be in the hands of a memoirist both old enough and good enough to wring this kind of coherence from life's chaos."- Alison Bechdel, The New York Times Book Review

"Like a string of Chines firecrackers." - Carolyn See, The Washington PostI

"Funny, sane, heartbreaking, and so deeply intelligent... It is just brilliant and true." - Robert Hass

"Vandenburgh vividly captures the strangely idyllic yet disturbed world the family shares and the double loss that breaks it apart. Her fierce love for her parents, who could 'neither abide the normal world - the house, the marriage, the children - nor exit it entirely,' and grief amid the family's disintegration come surging off the page." - Amanda Katz, The Boston Globe

"This woman traffics in the truth." - Anne Lamott

Jane Vandenburgh is the author of two novels, The Physics of Sunset and Failure to Zigzag. She lives in Point Richmond, California.