Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 I have married twice, and my sister three times. None of us set out for this. We meant to stick our landing on the first try, but we stumbled. My parents divorced when I was five, and my mother married Darrell when I was twentyseven. #2 The Three Fathers died in the order in which my mother had married them, and they died in the inverse order of their health. My father went first, even though he had made a religion of the elliptical trainer, the treadmill, and the NordicTrack. He spent four slow years dying of a neurological disease called progressive supranuclear palsy. #3 My father had grown up the third of seven children. He was born in 1931, the first of the Patchetts to have been born in America. His parents left England to find work in California, and after a long stretch of nothing, his father landed a job as a machinist at Columbia Pictures. #4 My father, as a writer, believed that childhood development rested on the ability to play volleyball. He wanted me to be athletic, join clubs, and start clubs. But I believed I would be a writer, and he didn’t understand that.