Born in 1947, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Carter is one of three children. His father was a lawyer and his mother an academic editor who counted passengers of the Mayflower among her ancestors. They met and married in Boston, but moved back to Mr. Carter's hometown to start a family and to oversee property left to him by an uncle. Carter remembers his youth as being mostly happy, though his father's heavy drinking frequently disrupted family life. A fair student at school, he took an early and avid interest in reading. Books soon became a haven for him, a safe place away from his father's alcoholism. "I wouldn't learn about the roles played in the 'alcoholic family' until many years later," Carter reported in SAAS, "when I began researching a novel, Up Country, on the experience of being the child of an alcoholic. . . . I wish I had known more as a child, because maybe then I wouldn't have felt that we were somehow uniquely flawed. . . . Like alcoholic families everywhere, we covered up. And, since we didn't talk to outsiders about our problems, we avoided talking about them at home.
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