Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses

Our real mother had been gone since the fall of 1970. Up and gone, gone and went, winked out like a dead star. She went to the movies with Roger, the boyfriend, and never came back. I was four then; Penny was three, and Teresa was six.

Two months after Paula McLain's shiftless father disappeared, her mother did the same, thrusting Paula and her sisters into an overburdened foster care system and into the lives of a wildly disparate series of temporary families.

Moving from the Spinozas' boxy house lit by the glow of a television set to the Clapps' plastic-covered furniture and quiet abuse, from the Fredricksons' cheery tract home where things really were too good to be true to the Lindberghs' collection of odd rules and rusty cars, Paula and her sisters quickly learned how to adapt to new sisters and brothers, new parents, and new rituals. With each new home came a spark of hope that this would be their last stop, a flicker of desire most often extinguished by the realities of foster care.

For fourteen years, Paula McLain endured a chaotic life of impermanence, developing a variety of survival tactics, a keen sense of humor, and an unbreakable bond with her two sisters. It was this bond that fostered the sisters' determination to stay together and that gave these three resilient girls their only understanding of love and permanence.

In her searing, unforgettable memoir, McLain records the dislocations, confusions, and unexpected pleasures of a rootless life. With the eye of a writer and the heart of a survivor, she brilliantly and heartbreakingly captures the tumult of a childhood and adolescence spent looking for what most of us take for granted: a place called home, a place to feel like family.

"What makes Like Family so remarkable are not the peculiar circumstances of Paula McLain's childhood but the depth of understanding that she brings to those circumstances and the beautiful prose in which she renders that understanding. Seldom have I seen so vividly evoked the need to belong to some, any, kind of family and the painful negotiations that time brings to even our closest intimacies." Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture

"Observant and yet somewhat guarded, McLain has written a straightforward and moving memoir." Booklist

"Although McLain's constant embellishments and fixation on superfluous character development detract from a consistent narrative thread, this is a brave account, evidently cathartic for the author and occasionally difficult for the reader." Publishers Weekly

"Not a foster-care horror story exactly, but a thoughtful recalling of the emotional toll a life of uncertainty can take." Kirkus Reviews

"Ms. McLain's close observation of the sisters' perils jumps with life and wry merriment. They take their pleasures and their sorrows as they arrive; even their times of desolation are narrated in language that conveys a kind of ragged glory — the tattered flag of their kinship still waves!" Paula Fox, author of Borrowed Finery

In the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's "Boys of My Youth" and Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club, " McLain has written a powerful and haunting memoir about the years she and her two sisters spent as foster children.

Paula McLain received her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and in the anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation. Her first book of poetry, Less of Her, was published in 1999. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is currently a waitress and a teacher of poetry in the low-residency M.F.A. program at New England College.