Clay offers a memoir of alcoholism, family strife, and an absentee father.

The author’s parents met in Virginia in 1965 at William & Mary College. A few years later, her father, Ed, moved to San Francisco, and her mother, Annie, soon followed. Both of Clay’s parents were excited by the counterculture and music of the time—and both, as it became clear in retrospect, were also alcoholics. Their relationship was seemingly fraught from the beginning, yet, in 1968, the author was born. (The couple got married in Golden Gate Park in 1969.) The book includes photos of Ed and Annie taking their young daughter to concerts and Big Sur, but the Californian idyll was not to last; the family moved back east, and things fell apart. Ed eventually left his wife and child to embark on an alcohol-fueled, almost nomadic life that would see him start another family and engage in a long struggle with poverty. He settled into a career as a truck driver, though, this too, would last only so long (citations for driving under the influence resulted in the loss of his license, and he spent time in jail). But throughout it all, he wrote letters. These were personal missives, typically penned in “clean print.” They could be thoughtful and snarky, infused with his literary and musical interests; in them, Ed would float ideas that would clearly never come to fruition, like the notion that he might one day get his driver’s license back.

In addition to the story of her father, the author also tells her own, sharing her personal struggles with alcohol, reconnecting with family, and, of course, growing up in a world in which her dad was always unreliable—the work closely examines the complexities of a family burdened by addiction and other stressors. The letters from Ed convey both a poetic soul and someone who, as Clay phrases it, “could also be pretty shitty sometimes.” Per the author, in his enthusiasm for emulating the artistic restlessness of a Jack Kerouac, Ed left in his wake endless trouble. (One of his sons relates how difficult it could be to have him do something as simple as attending a Little League game, recalling Ed “hanging right behind the umpire with a Miller Life tallboy in his hand, slurring ‘Knock the hide off that puppy, son!’”) Thanks to the letters he wrote, and the author’s fearless investigation, readers come away with a three-dimensional image of Ed (later chapters delve into what his upbringing was like). The memoir covers a lot of ground with so many family members and their perspectives included, and it can grow repetitious—after so many examples of Ed’s trouble with drinking, it is perhaps unnecessary to point out flatly that “he was so addicted to alcohol, and it ruled his life.” Yet with so much to untangle in Ed’s history, there is always reason to keep reading.

An honest, endearingly personal portrayal of addiction and its repercussions.