These four chapters comprise the first third of a memoir, which begins as a result of the narrator's onset of complicated grief and confusion over her mother's death, due to chronic alcoholism, in March of 2005. Conveyed within are the earliest parts of the narrator's journey to understanding herself by exploring the lives and pasts of her mother and father, while noting the parallels and comparisons of her parents' childhoods, personal traits, and familial relationships with her own. It is a search that inevitably leads the narrator to recreate her childhood experiences in a dysfunctional family. This work outlines three generations of the narrator's maternal and paternal families, demonstrating how their struggles converge through sorrow, hardship, and need. Essentially, this is a creative study in human degradation and loss.
