"In these linked essays, Cris Mazza probes questions of heritage, legacy, and identity. The result of collecting and preserving her parents personal artifacts-letters and photos, newspaper clippings, school records, baby books, yearbooks, concert programs, etc.-was not a linear narrative of their lives. Instead, the artifacts exposed mysteries, obscurities, ambiguities, odd juxtapositions, and questions. The individual stories of experiences-theirs as well as the traces of the authors-are a scaffold to allow a closer glimpse at the culture in which her parents were forging their lives in 1940s and 50s Southern California. The postwar era is more complex, convoluted and iniquitous than the idealized "growth of the middle class." Using these artifacts, the questions and research they provoke, Mazza put together the few puzzle pieces, then contemplated possibilities for a complete(r) picture. In so doing, she altered her own notions of the world she was born into and how it made her"--.