"A coming-of-age memoir by the daughter of privileged, artistic, hard-drinking, bohemian parents, set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, Cape Cod, and Mexico"--

Herrera's parents each married five times; when she was three years old her parents separated and she and her sister moved from Cape Cod to New York City to live with their mother and their new hard-drinking stepfather. They saw their father only during summers on the Cape, when they and the other neighborhood children would be left to their own devices by parents who were busy painting, writing, or composing music. This was "upper bohemia," a milieu of people born to privilege who chose to focus on the life of the mind. Here she captures the tension between a child’s excitement at every new thing and her sadness at losing the comfort of a reliable family. -- adapted from jacket