Like Family
Growing Up in Other People's Houses: a Memoir
By Paula McLain 

     Poet Paula McLain’s memoir of growing up among foster families because of her ex-con unreliable father, and a mother who took off for the movies for sixteen years, is an American tragedy with a bittersweet ending.

     McLain’s characters, the people she meets during her harrowing journey through a foster-care system increasingly gone mad, are both abusive and pitiable, criminally unfit to be their own children’s parents, and yet as adrift as Paula and her two sisters, Penny and Teresa. It’s difficult to feel sorry for chronically abusive, frigid, smothering and yet neglectful Hilde Lindbergh and her husband Bub, who tries to teach young Paula how to kiss, to say nothing of Gordon Clapp, who gets to Paula long before Bub (it’s a wonder charges haven’t been filed) and his wife, who sees the girls’ bedwetting as defiance, rather than a plea for a parent’s love.

     This could easily, in the hands of a lesser writer, be one long whine about “why I’m no good and why I hate my mother.” However, Paula McLain’s success as a writer and teacher points to a resilient spirit that every word in this moving, descriptive, evocative memoir embodies. McLain’s prose is a long-overdue love letter to her wry, spunky, strong personality, the children and families rebelliously proud of their differences in mainstream America, the love coming from real parenting such as McLain’s father’s ex-wife Donna, McLain’s churchgoing Granny, and the kindly Fredericksons, a foster family for the McLain girls, the forgotten Americana of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the heartbreak of teenage girls looking for love in sexual embraces, and most of all, the unbreakable bond between McLain and her sisters, Penny and Teresa, who are as fascinating as she is.

     Even McLain’s absent mother, who returns miraculously out of the blue, as often happens in real life, gets sympathetic treatment. Paula, after letting loose long-suppressed frustration against her mother Jackie, discovers through her mother’s husband Mike that Jackie would “cry and cry” on her children’s birthdays. In the end, Jackie herself becomes a tragic character, but like her gifted daughter, not one without hope.