Author and journalist Jeanette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary and their four children lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility...

Get out here, now , or I'm gonna kill you! he hollered. Little girls are hardwired to hold their daddies in high esteem, so it comes as a shock the first time a daughter feels the back of her daddy's hand across her face ... or watches him punch and kick her mother to within an inch of her life. How could this be? Her older sisters teach her how to survive, even when he comes for her in the night. A girl learns to become invisible, to look the other...

"I can't write a story about myself as the sad, quiet child of two drug addicts. That's not how it was, even when it was. To me, sleeping in the car was normal. Better, it was comfy and fun. I loved my bed made of clothes inside a trash bag that I sank into slowly like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family movie... I loved the motels and their swimming pools and trashy daytime TV channels... Nobody could tell us what to do." Brittany Means's childhood...