Chapter books were my salvation

The Prayer of an Unconventional Family

By ANNE LAMOTT, NYT

Thank you, God, or whatever you call yourself, if you are really there at all, and if you have a nice sense of humor (on which I am banking), for the family you gave me.

I grew up wanting a normal family that said prayers and went to church, but thank God you mostly ignored my menu choices, because instead I got left-wing intellectuals. I got parents who worshiped at the temples of James Joyce and Willa Cather, John Updike and John Cheever, Dorothy Parker and Evelyn Waugh -- whom, until I was 12 or so, I imagined as a nice Midwestern lady out in a garden who rolled her stockings down around her ankles when the Wichita sun grew too hot.

I wanted an Eastern blue blood PTA mother, but thank you for a Liverpudlian who studied classics in college. She could quote Aristotle -- and W. B. Yeats and Doris Lessing, and had long, beautiful, dark hair.

My dad wrote like a dream and looked like a Kennedy. They married and had three children. We grew up on Homer, E. B. White, Edith Hamilton and dictionaries, so we could learn where various words had gotten their humble and exhilarating starts in life.

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