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I had always wanted a watch. Unlike diamonds, watches were practical. They were for people on the run, people with appointments to keep and schedules to meet. That was the kind of person I wanted to be.

Jeannette understood that in real life when you are older you will have more responsibility and she welcomed it. She was ready to go out in the world and have a watch, have appointments to worry about, have a schedule to keep. She was a practical person unlike her parents and nothing will stop her from doing so.

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Until then, when I thought of writers, what first came to mind was Mom, hunched over her typewriter, clattering away on her novels and plays and philosophies of life and occasionally receiving a personalized rejection letter. But a newspaper reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on.

Jeannette knows that her mom lives in a huge fantasy land in her head. She can tell by the way her mom thinks that living the way they do is completely normal but it is not. Jeannette wants to live in the real world and talk about the real world she she has decided from a young age to be a person who gets paid to do that.

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At times I felt like I was failing Maureen, like I wasn’t keeping my promise that I’d protect her–the promise I’d made to her when I held her on the way home from the hospital after she’d been born. I couldn’t get her what she needed most–hot baths, a warm bed, steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat before school in the morning–but I tried to do little things.

Jeannette loved her sister Maureen very much and vowed she would always protect her. She just doesn't know if she will be able to do that given the impossible situation she is in. Her parents are the worst and no matter how hard she tries she cannot stop the craziness they cause.

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“I could not imagine what my life would be like- without him in it. As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had.”

No matter how horrible or irresponsible her father was, Jeannette still loved him. Her dad had a special kind of love for her, yes he had weird ways of showing it but he did love her. She was always his little girl and nothing will ever change that. She could forgive him for all his past transgressions and move on with good memories after his passing. Nothing is stronger than a parent's love for their child.

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Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can’t cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is “If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim.”

Jeanette had to learn from a very young that she couldn't rely on her parents to provide for her and to keep her safe. She could only count on her siblings to actually look out for her. So when times got tough she would usually find a way to make sure she and her siblings would survive.

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I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all humans were related, if the fire that burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow connected to the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. I didn’t have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.

There was rarely order in the Wells household, chaos was rampant and had no limits. Jeannette has only ever known chaos, order was a luxury in her childhood. At 3 years old her dress caught fire when making hot dogs and ever since then her life has been moments of chaos. Only when Jeannette is older and moves to New York is when her life has some order until her parents show up again.