cover image In Spite of Everything: A Memoir

In Spite of Everything: A Memoir

Susan Gregory Thomas. Random, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6882-1

For Thomas (Buy, Buy Baby)%E2%80%94and scores of other Gen-Xers, she posits%E2%80%94life's defining question wasn't "where were you when Kennedy got shot?" but "when did your parents split up?" Divorce and its ripple effect shape this keenly felt memoir as Thomas recounts a childhood cleaved in half by her parents' ugly separation and her shock as her own seemingly solid marriage ends. Raised in Berkeley and Philadelphia by her academic mother and a father whose dependence on alcohol made him either a jovial prankster or a sullen drunk, Thomas turned to punk rock, drugs, and alcohol when her parents split when she was 13. After graduating from Columbia, she landed a fact-checker job at PC Magazine in 1991, where she met her husband, Cal. It seemed almost too perfect. Gen-Xers weren't supposed to fall head over heels in love: this was the latchkey generation fueled by rejection, neuroses, and benign neglect. But Cal and Thomas married and had two girls in Brooklyn, even as their marriage rotted away, and they bitterly divorced after 16 years. As much a meditation on her own life as it is an examination of Gen-Xers and what it means to find your way when, as she quotes the words of Nirvana, "all alone is all we are,"Thomas's voice is clear even when darkness surrounds her. (July)