Chapter 2 Summary

Chapter 2 is an extended recollection by Anna about her life as a child and adolescent. She describes her family history as being bisected by a move to Chicago when Anna was fourteen. Until then, Anna recalls, her family (herself, her mother, and her father) lived in the grip of Anna's mother's family.

Anna recalls her summers at her grandparent's rural home in Maine, where there was no electricity or running water, and all transportation was by canoe or rowboat. Her mother's family, Anna recalls, was dominated by her grandfather, a self-made business man with a shock of white hair and bushy black eyebrows. Her grandfather's relationship to his sons-in-law was always stilted, Anna recalls, because he saw them as middling business men who took his daughters into a world of mediocrity.

Anna's mother was one of several sisters, all of whom were a...