At twenty, Alix Kates Shulman wrenched herself from her middle-class family and staked a claim to a fierce independence. From her bestselling novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen , to her brilliant memoir, Drinking the Rain , she has chronicled what it means to defy the expectations of family and society in order to map one's own life. Now, in this unflinching but tender memoir, she explores what it means to do what is expected of a daughter--discovering in the process the unexpected, complicated joys of going home. Told with the grace, clarity, and insight we have come to expect from her, A Good Enough Daughter is the story of Shulman's difficult journey from dependency to alienation to reconciliation, as she returns home to care for her aging parents in the last years of their lives. The intersection of her own memory with family documents discovered in her parents' house provides the structure for this riveting exploration of her life as a daughter. "Once again, Alix Kates Shulman showers gifts of insight on her readers, in this wonderfully wise, achingly honest memoir. . . . Everybody on these pages comes across with the vivid immediacy of life." --Rebecca Goldstein, author of Mazel "A stunning memoir. Shulman is a brilliant and completely captivating writer." --Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., author of The Dance of Anger "Shulman takes on the most daunting of challenges a contemporary memoirist can face--a happy childhood and a loving set of parents--and brings it off triumphantly in this uniquely wise, perceptive, bittersweet, and emotionally satisfying book." --Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body "As more and more of us live to unprecedented ages, inheriting our parents' care, may we do so with Alix's grace, insight, and good humor." --Nancy Mairs, author of Remembering the Bone House From the Hardcover edition. At twenty, Alix Kates Shulman wrenched herself from her middle-class family and staked a claim to a fierce independence. From her bestselling novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen , to her brilliant memoir, Drinking the Rain , she has chronicled what it means to defy the expectations of family and society in order to map one's own life. Now, in this unflinching but tender memoir, she explores what it means to do what is expected of a daughter--discovering in the process the unexpected, complicated joys of going home. Told with the grace, clarity, and insight we have come to expect from her, A Good Enough Daughter is the story of Shulman's difficult journey from dependency to alienation to reconciliation, as she returns home to care for her aging parents in the last years of their lives. The intersection of her own memory with family documents discovered in her parents' house provides the structure for this riveting exploration of her life as a daughter. Alix Kates Shulman is the author of ten previous books. She has taught at universities throughout the country, and her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Ms., The Women's Review of Books, Dissent, and The New York Times, among other publications. She divides her time between New York City and Maine. Whenever my parents came to visit me in New York City, I never met them at the airport; even during the years my husband had a car, I let them take a bus or taxi. Yet for forty years, each time I flew to Cleveland, my parents or brother met my plane no matter how I might demur. They did it out of courtesy and love and to insure that no preventable discomfort could provide me an excuse to stay away. Still, once I wrenched myself out of their lives, nothing they did could bring me back till I was ready. The years rolled by, with some years only the occasional phone call and not one visit. Now I was back--smack in the center of their lives. But this time my parents' car, armed with a car alarm, sat idle in its garage, and my brother Bob was dead. So I took an escalator down to the lowest level of the Cleveland airport, hopped on the convenient Rapid Transit that goes directly to downtown Cleveland and straight out Shaker Boulevard to a stop not two hundred feet from my parents' house. The Rapid had been whisking affluent professionals and businessmen from their downtown offices past Cleveland's industrial slums back up to their grand Shaker Heights houses ever since the 1920s, when the Van Sweringen brothers built the suburb, along with the fancy shops of Shaker Square, for successful Clevelanders--including the architect who built for himself my parents' house. I used to think the proximity of the house to the Rapid was Mom's trump in persuading Dad to sell the modest Cleveland-Heights-style three-bedroom on Ashurst Road where Bob and I grew up ("a postage stamp, but sweet," recalled my mother) for this six-bedroom English-style Shaker edifice: any day of the week he had only to step out the front door at five minutes past the hour or half hour to catch a train that would deposit him in a m