North of Normal: A Memoir of My Wilderness Childhood, My Unusual Family, and How I Survived Both

In this affecting memoir, Person describes growing up in the early 1970s amid the “tipi camp” where her extended family was squatting on Indian lands in Alberta, Canada. With a free-spirited teenage mother—the daughter of a Korean War vet and forest ranger who yearned to live in nature unencumbered by the U.S. government—Person was doted upon by her pot-smoking grandparents and uninhibited if emotionally erratic aunts and uncles (one uncle, Dane, moved in and out of a mental asylum), although it was challenging living in tipis with no running water, eating whatever her grandfather, Papa Dick, happened to hunt, and using the communal “shit pit,” all in a harsh northern climate. As long as she had her mother close, Person was happy, except that her mother had to find men to support them, and therein began a peripatetic cycle of moving in with one marijuana-growing, thieving boyfriend after another, or back to the tipis with her grandparents. From time to time Person did visit her father, a middle-class professional established in a new marriage in San Francisco, yet it was a modeling competition at age 13 that allowed her finally to feel somewhat “normal” and find her own identity. [em]Agent, Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. (July) [/em]