"In 1974, when Anna Cypra Oliver was five years old, her father put a gun to his head and killed himself. That shot has haunted her all her life. Obsessed by the need to learn who he was and why he died, she set out on a journey of discovery, following the clues he had scattered during his brief lifetime. Assembling My Father is the account of her search for the truth about her father, a failed architect and child of the counterculture, who ended his life at the age of thirty-five. It is a mosaic of language and images - photographs, journal entries, even doodles - the artifacts that are part of the record of his life." "Lewis Weinberger, Anna's father, the product of an affluent and cultivated Jewish background, married a vibrant, beautiful girl with strong avant-garde leanings. In the late 1960s, they made their way to Taos, New Mexico. There, in the chaos and disorder of hippie life, their marriage foundered, a devastating blow to Lewis and the beginning of his drug-saturated disintegration. After his suicide, Anna's mother, born Jewish, became an ardent Christian fundamentalist, taking up with a series of rough-edged, sometimes violent men. This was the world of Anna's childhood, indelibly delineated here." "A personal memoir, Oliver's story is also that of a turbulent era that, for better and for worse, changed the world."--BOOK JACKET.