This biography tells of Susan J. Miller being raised in Washington Heights, New York in the 1950s in a family whose lack of money, roots and happiness appeared to have no definable cause. When Susan turned 21, her father's sudden disclosure of his 15-year heroin addiction brings vertiginous uncertainty to every memory, she retraces the innocence and deceptions of a childhood lived at a distance from crucial truth. She recounts: her father scoring drugs in Harlem and thrilling to bebop jazz at Birdland; her mother's blank-eyed depression; moments of unbearable tension at the oilcloth-covered table in her grandmother's kitchen; her brother's helpless rage; and conversations between father and daughter, who in many ways are more alike than they realize.