In the first grade

I must have been five when she left home, and until I was eleven, when she invited the three of us, Mom-mom, Grandpa, and me, to her apartment for dinner on Thanksgiving Day—a historic event for which I have no explanation—I never knew where my mother lived. I saw her every day, but she was so afraid of losing her privacy, her fragile illusion of freedom, that it took years before she dared to give out her address or even her phone number.' Thus says Isabel, the first-person narrator in Kathryn Harrison's brilliant debut novel about the struggle of a daughter to escape the oppressive ties of family and blood.