Nearing seventy-eight, retired academic Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi has just released her first memoir. Spoken in the voice of ‘Alicia,’ Rabuzzi’s imaginary friend and childhood protective alter ego, the memoir details a strange life as the only child of old-line WASPs, living out the American Dream—in terrifying reverse. Starting at the top, ‘Alicia’ experiences the descent of both parents. Mama, with a Biochemistry Ph.D., is conducting early radiation research at Sloan-Kettering [then Memorial Hospital] when she elopes from a Manhattan Speak Easy with Howard, Alicia’s never-practicing lawyer, perpetual dreamer, Daddy. The bizarre family odyssey begins when Howard’s newest dream, to be a Hudson Valley ‘gentleman farmer’, derails with no warning, following Pearl Harbor, and enlistment. Life from then on accelerates in oddity, taking ‘Alicia’ and Mama first to Manhattan, then on to Plainfield, Vermont—for the Bohemian Eden of Goddard College. Out of the blue, two years post-War, Daddy phones, having just bought a new farm while lunching and ‘liquidly refreshing’ himself, at a bar in rural Unadilla, New York. Slowly, from age nine and a half, Alicia deals with the ever stranger unreality of her life, She copes by separating the dream-infused ‘reality’ inside the house, and that of the world outside the door. A backdrop of nightly drinking and fighting is stark contrast to the nightly farm chores done all alone. Yet each summer Alicia is a repeat guest at her aunt’s posh summer camp where most campers arrive in chauffeur driven Cadillacs. Here she must perform yet another struggle to distinguish ‘real’ from ‘unreal.' Who are these privileged young Southern belles in the making? Who is she, ‘Alicia’