Magnus

My childhood was country clubs, private schools, foreign languages, swim meets, tennis lessons, horses, hunting.  I grew up hearing the stories of how my great-grandfather lost a plantation in the Civil War, how as a boy my grandfather was expected to dress for dinner.  But my parents were also mercurial and impulsive.  When I was 9 years old, my father went to prison for bank fraud.  My mother was unstable, sometimes showing an outrageous wit, sometimes indifferent, and even absent from our lives for long stretches of time.  I was caught between two very different worlds -- privilege and affluence on the one hand, and on the other the kind of chaos, darkness and absurdity that people usually try to hide.