"The day my sister, Gillian, decided to pronounce her name with a hard G was, coincidentally, the same day my mother returned, early and alone, from her honeymoon" (Chapter 1, p. 3).

"My father has never remarried—the woman he left my mother for died, suddenly and tragically, of ovarian cancer before they could both divorce and remarry, cancer moving more expeditiously than the court system, and although he is not religious (my parents were married in the Rainbow Room by a judge) I think he felt in some way punished by this death, and since then he has been involved briefly with a long string of much younger women who all seem to have the same artificial-looking blond 'highlights' in their perfectly brown hair" (Chapter 1, p. 14).

"Of course I went with a bad attitude but it was genuinely awful right from the beginning" (Chapter 3, pg. 41).

"I felt a...