Etiquette for Surviving a Dual Identity

Set in the vivid, high-contrast landscape of the late 1970s, this memoir observes the head-spinning summers of a ten-year-old child caught between two fiercely opposing worlds.

Every July, a mother packed her daughters into a clementine-colored Volkswagen squareback to visit a Yarmouthport, Cape Cod antique home governed by a Spanish Scottish Granny who strictly maintained the elegant, rule-bound rituals of the Edwardian era. With their father left in Boston to work, Granny often worried that her daughter and son in law were hippies and complained that her daughter was “...raising them like savages!” But when August arrived, the whole family headed north into the raw, off-the-grid wilderness of tiny Northfield, in Washington County, Maine. This meant trading formal afternoon tea, starch, and etiquette lessons for a remote survivalist-inspired camp with no running water, electricity, or phones. Dinner was what you caught in the lake that day, along with a few staples brought in from the trek to town once per week.

The narrative explores Elspeth’s annual cultural whiplash through the map of a typical day, mapping the profound ways a child learns to shape-shift between the parlor and the pines to discover a resilient identity of their own. Etiquette lessons learned along the way are shared at the end of each short chapter.