This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist’s journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest to an antique-filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, ‘brilliant’ but alcoholic parents. At the age of seventeen, she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilization her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the ‘mundane, middle-class existence’ she had always craved. In her apartment, overlooked by ‘a portrait of someone else’s ancestor,’ she recounts poignant remembered images of star-watching with her father, juxtaposed with recollections of irregular meals, accidents, and police-car chases, and reveals her complex feelings of shame, guilt, pity, and pride toward her parents.