In Spite of Everything

"For most of my generation--Generation X--there is only one question: 'When did your parents split?' Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything."In this powerful, poignant, and often laugh-out-loud-funny memoir, Susan Gregory Thomas reflects on that life-defining question and its answer through a lens imprinted by memory and sharpened by time.Raised in Berkeley, Thomas grew up in a seemingly stable household. But when the family moved east when she was twelve, her father, a charming alcoholic, ran off with his secretary, and her mother collapsed. Thomas and her younger brother joined the ubiquitous flocks of 1980s latchkey kids: collateral damage in their parents' wars, sustaining private injuries they would try to self-treat throughout adolescence and adulthood. When Thomas became a wife and mother in her early thirties, she made a fierce promise: She would never let her own children know the scorched earth of...