I was born right here in Clarion; I grew up in that big brown turreted house next to Percy's Texaco. My mother was a fat lady who used to teach first grade. Her maiden name was Lacey Dabney.

This paragraph opens the second chapter of Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions, and it is very arch. What do I know about "that" house, or Clarion, or Percy, that I should be thus invited in; if I accept the invitation, what can I make of someone who calls her mother "a fat lady," or who imagines, without seeming herself to care, that I need to know the fat lady's maiden name? Nor do matters improve when she starts speaking of herself:

These were my two main worries when I was a child: one was that I was not their true daughter, and would be sent away. The other was that I...