Not surprisingly, Freeman, a novelist who has previously drawn on her life in her fiction, flashes back to her childhood in Ogden, Utah. She was one of two girls among eight siblings — by Mormon standards, not a huge family. Her mother, she says, loved babies; her father, working a civilian desk job with the U.S. Air Force, lamented the musician's life he might have had without them. Sometimes he vented his frustrations in emotional abuse and petty acts of violence, which included "a nasty habit of lifting his children up by the hair at the back of their necks when he was angry over something they'd done."