Over the holidays, try talking to your relatives like an anthropologist

[Warpy]

14. I would have had to interview them more like a psychiatrist

I knew a lot about how my mother grew up surrounded by psychos. My dad didn't talk much about his formative years but I did read the diary he kept in 1931 when he was a teenager hustling pennies and nickels for movie and baseball money. He and his brothers were known around town as "those hellions."

I did get to know them as people, but it took uninstalling the buttons they loved to push. Once they realized those buttons didn't work any more, they relaxed into being themselves. It was a gift.

Anyway, neither had a leg to stand on when it came to criticizing my own teenager from hell years. They knew it and I knew it.