<div><p>Patricia Foster's lyrical yet often painful memoir explores<BR>the life of a white middle-class girl who rew up in rural south Alabama<BR>in the 1950s and 1960s, a time and place that did not tolerate deviation<BR>from traditional gender roles. Her mother raised Foster and her sister<BR>as "honorary boys," girls with the ambition of men but the temperament<BR>of women.<BR></P> <p>An unhappy, intelligent woman who kept a heartbreaking secret<BR>from everyone close to her, Foster's mother was driven by a repressed rage<BR>that fed her obsession for middle-class respectability.<BR>By the time Foster reached age fifteen, her efforts to<BR>reconcile the contradictory expectations that she be at once ambitious<BR>and restrained had left her nervous and needy inside even while she tried<BR>to cultivate the appearance of the model student, sister, and daughter.<BR>It was only a psychological and physical breakdown that helped her to realize<BR>that she couldn't save her driven, complicated mother and must struggle<BR>instead for both understanding and autonomy.<BR></P></DIV>