I originally wrote this as a speech that I gave at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1987. It’s about the various aspects of family—historic, fictional, idealized (the one we all want and nobody has), fake (the one we pretend we’ve got), and it contains a lot about my own family and how I became a storyteller because of an inherited tendency to mythologize and wax philosophical about everyday trials and events. Family life informs all of my novels and is undoubtedly one of my main obsessions. In this chapbook I try to explain why this is so, but I’m not sure whether I reach any deep conclusions about it.