Before I Had a Mother. A Calumet Childhood in Pieces

Before I Had a Mother is a brief, spare memoir of the author's earliest years in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he lived with his grandparents. The book tells of a live before television, where sex was still fraught with mystery, where violence was limited to cap pistols, and traces of smoking could be concealed by drinking lime juice. As being a boy grows more urgent than being an altar boy (and George Gip gives way to Janet Leigh), the muffled absences of the author s experience come to be embodied in his mother, who suddenly appears once his grandmother dies.