Jarrett spends most of this book struggling with how to make sense of his family relationships. His mother can’t be relied on, and his father seems at first to want nothing to do with him. Even the stable adults in his life, his grandparents, aren’t always the easiest people to trust: Joe and Shirley fight a lot, and Shirley’s temper is sometimes frightening.

Jarrett shows his own perspective of what parenthood means as it evolves over the course of the book. As a little kid, he just wants his mom back; as a middle schooler, he stops trusting her and has no desire to ever know his father; as a high schooler, he confronts Leslie with his anger and starts a tentative relationship with Richard. All the while, he’s also learning to appreciate Joe and Shirley for acting as his real parents: If in middle school he’s embarrassed that he doesn’t have a normal-looking family, by the end of the book he’s calling his grandparents mom and dad, saying: “I had two incredible parents right there before me the entire time. They were just a generation removed” (297).