Word: lynbrook
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...favorite book was Les Miserables, and in the family's doomed house on Earle Avenue in Lynbrook, New York, his mother kept an ax under the bed to even the odds against the murderers she imagined. His father, a sardonically unhappy bisexual, was much given to long absences; his younger brother became an alcoholic suicide. Young Vivian Chambers never went to a dentist, and by the time he grew up and began calling himself by his mother's family name of Whittaker, his teeth had gone to memorable ruin. In his mouth, as in his early life's story...
...Westy in tone. Yet his 100-page chapter, "The Story of a Middle-Class Family," is among the finest and most frightening of American autobiographies--Sophocles visiting Theodore Dreiser, with gothic touches, told in Chambers' incomparable prose style. "Dysfunctional" does not quite describe the Chambers family of Lynbrook, Long Island--the weird, derisive, mostly vanishing father, who was bisexual; the mad grandmother wandering the house at night with a knife; the mother who slept with an ax under the bed; the alcoholism; the beloved brother Richard who put his head in an oven...