What Growing Up Wasp Taught Me About... Growing Up Wasp

I've been reading a ton of memoirs as I continue to work on mine.  Currently I have three going: fellow Chicagoan Robyn Okrant's Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk; Cathy Alter's Up For Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over; and Mishna Wolff's I'm Down, about growing up white with a father who thought he was black. 

My story isn't quite as dramatic, but it was at times a fish-out-of-water experience. Outside our house it was the 1970s, but inside it was the 1890s, and we tended to talk about people who had been dead for a century or two as if they were there in the living room sipping tea.   For some strange reason, this made other people's eyes glaze over with boredom.  It's still a bad family habit, and when we visit each other's houses, we catch up with old pieces of furniture as much as with each other.  ("Why, if it isn't the Phelps divan! You're holding up well!") 

Here's a photo of my parents, my brother and me on the famous divan itself.  It came from my mother's father's mother's side in Richmond, Kentucky... oh never mind.

I'll be reading a piece about my eccentric upbringing, a modified version of the introduction to the book, at Essay Fiesta, a monthly personal essay reading series, at the Book Cellar in March.  Stay tuned for more information!