This engaging memoir relates stories about George Bowering's small-town BC upbringing and his parents -- his father long dead and his mother more recently passed on at the age of 100 -- while at the same time honouring the author's other 'parents': Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, and Roland Barthes. Borrowing a structure and some precepts about writing from Stein, Bowering remains true to his inimitable self, relating his recollections and observations, his ever-curious mind travelling across the decades as he recounts some of the objects, food, rooms, and people that have shaped his engagement with the world. Charles Olson's ideas about proprioception shape Bowering's approach to himself as 'an object among objects' (and, with increasing age and frailty, even one containing numerous objects), while Roland Barthes's writing strategies also make themselves felt throughout.