The oldest child in a middle-class household in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the son of a piano teacher and a social worker, the author was, from the age of six, an eccentric with enormous aspirations - none of them ever fulfilled, of course - who stood out not only from his more conventional parents and brother and sister but from everyone else in the neighborhood. In the tradition of Russell Baker's Growing Up and Spalding Gray's Sex and Death to the Age 14, Mark Salzman recalls his tortured years so fondly, so self-deprecatingly and so humorously that readers will devour this delightful look backward with smiles on their faces.