Mother Climbed Trees

"Mother had passed the smoking-pajama and Free Thought period, and we were started on the era of knickers, Christian Science, and Crazy Water Crystals." With a mother who careened from nonconformity to instability, and who confined her stepfather by stealing his clothes, Cynthia alternated between concealing and admiring her outlandishly flamboyant mother, while finding her way as a teenage stunt-person in extravagant production numbers of 1930s musicals. Mother Climbed Trees (1958) is a tender, hilarious, entertaining memoir of a girl caught in the furious whirlwind of a mother who casts aside societal expectations and creates her own reality.