from the prologue:
"This is a memoir about growing up Catholic but it has nothing to do, or everything to do, with religion. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio...last child in a family that was, as my father put it, two potatoes away from being dirt poor. For those days, at the beginning of the Great Depression, that was not too bad.

Though my childhood was fenced in by poverty and I knew the ungenerous consequences of class, it was, to paraphrase from my favorite novel, 'the worst of times, it was the best of times.' I grew up in a cocoon, an Irish Catholic Parish."