On the whole, I enjoyed reading this book. A lot of the details of Hampl's life-- growing up in the Upper Midwest, living with parents of two very different temperaments from two very different ethnic backgrounds, becoming a writer to the mixed pride and incomprehension of her parents-- are similar to my own. Hampl is also a very good writer at the paragraph level. However, I think this book could have used much more editing than it got. There are several anecdotes that she repeats several times throughout the book. She does give different details each time, so I guess it's possible that this was a stylistic choice, but I got the feeling that she had just written up these stories every time she thought of them and no one ever went back and decided which ones to take out. It gave the book a choppy feeling and took me out of the flow each time this happened.