OF A GOLDEN AGE

A friend of mine is having a serious family emergency, and that coupled with a migraine have made me a little tetchy and subject to sentimentalism. Do you know what the solution is? ANNE LAMOTT. My mom grabbed a copy of her novel All New People in a library sale at her school and passed it along. It’s short and wonderful with a lot of oomph. In it, Lamott tells of an adult Nanny Goodman looking back on her own childhood with a writer father and a not-doctrinaire-but-still-nutty religious mother.

One thing I know for certain is that my memories are not the same as those of my brother or mother or father; we all have our own version of what really happened, of how it really was. It is a Rashomon history. If you took our four versions and laid them one on top of the other in bands, as they do in sound mixing, you would end up with a song of my family.

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