Elizabeth Warren’s memoir begins with the story of a family in collapse. She was 12 years old when her father had a heart attack.

His recovery was slow. Unable to work, the family’s finances tanked. The Studebaker was repossessed. When he was able to return to work, Montgomery Ward took away his job selling carpeting and gave him a job selling lawn mowers on commission. Warren asked her mother why the old job was gone. “In her view, his company had robbed him of something he’d worked for. And now, she said, ‘They think he’s going to die.’ ”

The financial spiral had the predictable effect on the family’s emotional life. “Sometimes that spring I would overhear my parents arguing,” Warren remembers, “I guess I shouldn’t describe it as arguing; my father never said much of anything, while my mother yelled louder. They drank more, a lot more. . . . I knew that my mother blamed my daddy for not doing ‘what a man is supposed to do’ and taking care of us.”

Her mother ended up getting a job at Sears, her father got a job as a maintenance man and the family finances stabilized — at a low level. Warren concluded the episode this way: “My mother never had it easy. She fought for everything she and my daddy ever had.”