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was mature enough to understand the nuanced Day cards we received from them, containing 5
joys of a recently procured coffee-table book either a five-dollar bill or a five-dollar check.
on the Kennedys or the acquisition of a deli- My mother’s parents were less well-off.
cious chocolate fondue recipe? Plus, I was Her father was an accountant, then a comp- section three
their number-one source for scene-by-scene troller in the auto industry. Her mother was a
summaries of films they were too harried to teacher.
see. I stood next to them in the kitchen while Before my father sold my childhood home /
they unloaded the dishwasher, sipping lem- in Redmond to move to Seattle, I dug through
onade, casually leaning against the counter boxes in the garage, salvaging old books and
or sitting atop it, retelling the plots of Clue photos. I found letters my father and mother had Carrie Brownstein
and Romancing the Stone from title sequence written back and forth when they were engaged.
to end credits. Meanwhile, my friend worked He was working for the Washington state D.A.
on homework or chatted on the phone in the and she was still in college. My mother’s notes
other room. That was child’s play. I felt adult, were sweet and longing; she expressed a yearn-
important. ing to be reunited, to be out of Illinois, to start
When a friend’s father died of Lou Gehrig’s 10 a life. My father wrote considerate but formal
disease, her mother counted me among the responses, largely about his job and the Pacific
first to be notified. I was getting ready for school Northwest.
when I received the call; I took the news like a At holidays, descriptions of relatives were
pro. No tears. When was the funeral? Did they not about how they lived but rather how they
need anything? Later, in the school bathroom died. My paternal grandmother would point
during lunch, I delivered the story to our other to the faces in pictures and rattle off every
friends with the gravity and stoicism of a nightly- kind of cancer you could think of — and ones
news anchor. Here were the facts. They wept you couldn’t think of. I’d tune into stories
streams of turquoise mascara while I stood near about our family, hoping to glean insight,
the paper towel dispenser and let them know only to have them quickly be disputed and
that this was just how things were. This was life. left unfinished. Someone might mention an
Tough it out. older brother or a baby, a vacation they once
But the reality of my mom being in the
eating disorders unit was far less glamorous and
a lot more painful. There was little to brag about.
***
My parents grew up in the Chicago area, my
father in Evanston, my mother in Skokie. They Carrie Brownstein, “Disappearance,” from Hunger
met at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Makes Me a Modern Girl, copyright © 2015 by Carrie Brownstein. Used by permission of River- head, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Champaign when my dad was in law school
and my mom was an undergrad. For their wed-
ding anniversary they drove a VW bus to Seat-
tle, the city where I would be born. I know very
little about my parents’ childhoods; the histor- This is an image of Brownstein’s parents, which
ical facts are hazy and scattered. My father’s she included in her narrative.
dad was a doctor, his mother a housewife; Based on what you know from her narrative,
why do you think she included this specific
“Dr. and Mrs. Stanley Brownstein” said the picture?
return address on the birthday and Valentine’s
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample. 205
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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