There was a lot of pain on Munjoy Hill, a close-knit working-class neighborhood of immigrants that also saw its share of drugs, alcohol, poverty, and violence in the 1960s and 1970s. A young Ed Crockett, at home with seven siblings, an ailing and broke mother, and more than a dozen stray animals, was caught in the middle of it all and looking for a way out. Crockett's memoir is an often bittersweet story that captures the joys of youth and love of family set against a backdrop of poverty, uncertainty, and the ever-present spectre of an alcoholic and often homeless father whose flaws, life choices, and fate haunt a young man and tear at his confidence even as a adult. Can he honor his mother's pleadings to “don't be like your father” and rise above the family's cycle of poverty and alcoholism? With love, compassion, and the cleared-eyed benefit of time, Crockett writes of his siblings, his neighborhood, the eccentric wisdom of his mother, and life in a small city in the years before it emerged as one of the hippest places in America.