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She opened by describing her childhood in the fifties. “It was the era of Father Knows Best,” she sneered... “In the sixties, I became a disinheritor,” she announced proudly, a finger pointed at the crowd. A few people cheered like sports fans—“Yeah! Yeah!”—but most remained quiet and alert. She’d tried to throw away the dominant belief systems she’d grown up with, she explained. At the top of her list: Catholicism, patriarchy, and patriotism.

“But did I throw away too much from my parents’ generation?” she asked. “Did I throw the baby out with the bathwater? Was there something from that time that I didn’t appreciate? Something valuable I left behind?”

“No!” she screamed. “I didn’t disinherit enough!”

What have I inherited from my parents’ generation? My childhood looked very different from my mom’s... in a household with a quality of transience and openness that felt transgressive... Unlike my mom, I don’t want to throw my upbringing away. I want to sort through the remains and build on what feels solid in the face of a world I find troubled and precarious.

— Group Living and Other Recipes by Lola Milholland (Page 7 - 8)