Or, More Appropriately

Or, More Appropriately is a collection of 13 personal essays dealing with the experience of isolation and removal and how it feels to stand apart from others, including one's family, and view life as a distant observer. The narrator begins with his memory of being an only child with a creative mind but no audience. He describes how it feels to grow up under culturally diverse parents, neither one of whom the writer fully claims, nor entirely identifies with. And the sentiments he experiences as an adult judging himself through his father's eyes. When his observation falls onto the lives of friends and strangers he is torn between his own opinion and the reality of the moment. Each essay finds the speaker at the shaping of his identity and what occurs when he becomes less detached and more real.