Sheirer, a professor of English at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, CT, is prompted to write his memoir after a visit to his family home in a rural, obscure Pennsylvania town twenty years after leaving the place for "greener pastures." He returns to spend a weekend at the property which is no longer owned by his family, and stays in the newly remodeled cabin that his family once rented out to deer hunters. It is the perfect setting for him to reflect on the "mostly normal" childhood he spent growing up on the family farm, the son of hardworking, down to earth parents who had a good sense of humor, but also forced him to eat liver (ugh) on a regular basis.

Growing Up Mostly Normal is an endearing and poignant story for all its ordinary moments in the life of a boy who came of age in the late 1970's; a boy who wanted nothing more than to escape the small town reality of Hyndman, PA and go away to college so that he could do "more" with his life. From the vantage point of middle age, Sheirer reflects on his childhood days, and during the course of that long winter weekend in the family cabin, he makes several illuminating discoveries about his life.

Through a series of vignettes about his childhood, Sheirer portrays the simple goodness of his family's life on a farm and the role he played as the youngest son of six children and the only boy growing up in a household with sisters (his search for privacy led him to set up camp in an old trailer on the property where he spent his summers "practicing for adulthood"). He shares with us a variety of scenes from his youth--from his need to demonstrate his "manliness" despite his dislike for butchering cows which leads him to shoot a bull right between the eyes, to his days playing on the high school basketball team to his first thoughts of young love--all endearing glimpses into his past.

Sheirer tells his story in a conversational, down to earth and engaging style, enabling the reader to easily identify with him, particularly when he reveals his own adult insecurities at the onset of his memoir. He writes, "Amazingly, no one has pulled the confident professor mask off my face to reveal the bashful farm kid beneath. With luck, I'll keep the charade going for another twenty years until I'm eligible to retire into safe obscurity."

During his reflective weekend, Sheirer finally climbs to the top of the mountain that graced the background of his childhood. Looking out on his home below he remarks, "Every prominent feature is a place I knew intimately in my youth, a place where I stood and looked up at the quarry and wondered what the view was like up there. Now I know." His mountain top epiphany seems to serve as an appropriate metaphor for how long it really takes us to finally see our lives from this larger perspective.

Sheirer's memoir provides the impetus for some soul searching on his part, particularly in regard to family relationships. Reflecting on his father twenty years after his death, with whom he arm wrestled and won five years before he died he notes: "I'm not sure what to make of my decision to pin my father's arm to the table...can I allow myself the thought that I beat my father simply because I wanted him to know that I could."

Thinking about his grandmother, the family matriarch, Sheirer writes, "If I could go back to my childhood knowing what I know now, I would be less inclined to pull away from Grandma's touch and sneak to the other room when she repeated her stories for the fifth time. I would try to connect with her and her mysterious past, to let her know that I knew about her pain and that I knew she was so much more than the shriveled old woman she had become late in life."

We learn from Sheirer's memoir that sometimes we all need to delve into our past to make sense of our present: "Coming here gives me a powerful and contradictory mix of emotions and memories--bits of pride at the hardworking farm boy I was, bits of embarrassment at the naïve hillbilly kid I was, and lots of confusion about how I got from here to where I am now."

The kind of introspective journey back in time that Sheirer makes shows us that we can ultimately come to a better understanding of ourselves. In Sheirer's words, "Even though I did my best for years to pretend my odd upbringing didn't have anything to do with my adulthood, I realize now that the boyhood I had helped form the man I am. . .My childhood was mostly happy and mostly normal, and I've mostly come to understand its wonders as well as its limits." And in the scheme of things, that kind of insight into the dichotomy of life is quite an accomplishment indeed.