This author has a way with gloss. And she probably entitled this wonderful memoir “The pocket history of sex in the twentieth century” to write the literary wrong that she cites: most women do not write anything about sex. She grew up in 1950s California with her parents, her father an architect who went to the wrong bars, her mother an artist who inked storyboards for Disney. They were both people who charmed and hated everybody else but they, especially her mother, never fit in ,e.g.: “Then what holds the stars up? Geo asked our mom. Through that pure night air, stars seemed to jiggle and dance, this jitter caused by atmosphere. Why sweetie-honey-baby, she sighs, I honestly have no idea. Then she smirks. She smirks as if she’s sharing this joke with our dad, the nowhere, now-here, now-not-here, who is what she calls Your Faw-thur Which Aren’t in Heaven. This is how I know she’s drunk. Geo begins to cry. Wrong answer, Mom, Wrong answer for a five-year-old. Geo’s crying harder now, so our mother kneels on the hard sand and takes him in her lap, singing in her broken voice, Ground-round version, mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peeep, sleep in heavenly peep. She sings this though it is February. There, there, there, there, she tells Geo, holding him to her, grimacing over his head to go, See! From this Will and I are supposed to get how hilarious it is that our mother is expected to act like a mother, instead of what she really is, which is this rare thing, this wonderfully gifted and spectacular being, the Radiant Child she always has been. ( From 2. Pull of Gravity). The family is wonderful, but after the father commits suicide, the mother is committed to a mental institution and the children are committed to other relatives, just a little too late to ever escape the original parental input. Jane Vandenburgh has plenty to say about that, too. I particularly liked her observation that the words “creamy, succulent and juicy” refer to a pornographic menu. Sex is reserved for slimy adults attacking children and men unlike any she has ever met or even imagined violently forcing themselves on her. What a dog. Fortunately there is a lot more to this book as there is with everything Jane Vandenburg writes