He grapples with anger at both of his parents for the different ways they neglected him. As he gets older, his feelings begin to change. Initially, Jarrett has no interest in getting in contact with his father. Also a teenager at the time of Jarrett’s conception, Richard had offered no support to Leslie and had never been in touch with Jarrett. When Jarrett was an older child, his grandparents sat him down to tell him that his mother had struggled with addiction and was in prison, and they also told him about his father, Richard. Jarrett reproduced some of their letters and drawings in the book. Like her son, she had a talent for art, and they traded cartoons back and forth during her imprisonment. The two maintained a relationship through letters while his mother never explained where she had gone, she encouraged him to draw. Jarrett developed a deep connection with his grandparents but was also confused and sad at the disappearance of his mother. However, they took good care of him and were mostly supportive of his ambitions to be a cartoonist. They were loving but volatile: Both his grandmother and grandfather had problems with alcohol, and his grandmother was sometimes verbally abusive. The young Jarrett, unaware of his mother’s illness and imprisonment, went to live with his grandparents. She would be in and out of custody for the rest of her life. Addicted to heroin, she struggled to take care of Jarrett and was sent to jail and then to a halfway house. Leslie was the second of the couple’s five children, and she got pregnant with Jarrett when she was still in high school.
Beginning and ending with stories of Jarrett as a teenager in the 1990s, the book dips back into his family history, retelling the high-school romance of his grandparents, Joe and Shirley, and the painful life of his mother, Leslie.
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