Camping with Strangers

Parents usually hope their kids learn from the mistakes they made when they were their age. They tell them stories about when they were kids and how life was different. Occasionally, the life of a child mirrors the life of a parent. How the child reacts to those similar situations is largely affected by how the parent raised them—or didn’t.
This series of essays—often humorous, sometimes downbeat—chronicles the author’s life from birth to just shy of forty, demonstrating how events in his life mirror those of his mother. Their situations while seemingly very different, were often eerily similar. How each reacted and the results that followed, however, are quite different. With excerpts from his mother, the lessons learned during her childhood serve as the backstory for her son’s life. From being shot at to bra shopping and road-trips to codependency, this book is a self-reflection of how we become—or avoid becoming—our parents.