Emily Fox Gordon was a fatty, an academic failure, a schoolyard pariah, and a disappointment to her highly educated parents. And yet her early life was, as she puts it, "a succession of moments of radiant apprehension." Growing up in a Massachusetts college town in the fifties, she cultivated the writer's lifelong habit of translating experience into words. As she grew older, she became aware of her mother's long withdrawal into alcoholic depression. For Emily this was a new kind of observation, made from the outside-one that changed her childish view of the world, and ended her childhood.