Summary
A chronicle of the author's hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State describes the family members, first friendships, and early experiences with death that shaped her literary career. Full description
- Author's note
- We Begin
- Mommy & Me
- Happy Chicken: 1942-1944
- Discovering Alice: 1947
- District School #7, Niagara County, New York
- Piper Cub
- After Black Rock
- Sunday Drive
- Fred's Signs
- "They All Just Went Away"
- "Where Had God Gone"
- Headlights: The First Death
- "The Brush"
- An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend
- "Start Your Own Business!"
- The Lost Sister: An Elegy
- Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time
- Detroit: Lost City 1962-1968
- Story Into Film: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and Smooth Talk
- Photo Shoot: West Eleventh Street, NYC, March 6, 1970
- Food Mysteries
- Facts, Visions, Mysteries: My Father Frederic Oates, November 1988
- A Letter to My Mother Carolina on Here Seventy-Eighth Birthday, November 8, 1994
- "When I Was a Little Girl And My Mother Didn't Want Me"
- Excerpt, Telephone Conversation with My Father Frederic Oates, May 1999
- The Long Romance
- My Mother's Quilts
- Afterword.