Grant, the man who raised Smith, was a WWII veteran, a working-class intellectual, and the quiet moral center of her childhood. His idealism, rooted in a deep belief in human dignity and expressed through his lifelong love of poetry, music, and philosophical inquiry, gradually curdled into disillusionment. Grant’s favorite poem, Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem” from 1834, is about loving one’s fellow man; it encapsulates both his original faith and the distance he traveled from it. “My father has always searched for the meaning of life” (212), Smith writes—restless seeking that she recognizes in herself as well. Grant gave her the framework of books and music within which her imagination first developed, and he encouraged her sense that the interior life is worth tending. In the memoir, Grant is a figure of love as expressed through daily presence.

Sidney was Smith’s biological father, whom she never knew about. Also a WWII veteran, he entered her story through absence, reconstituted from photographs, records, and research. The revelation of his existence nevertheless arrived with Smith’s immediate recognition of kinship she had not known was missing: “My blood father is from a line of wanderers, uprooted and replanted to spring elsewhere, one hundred percent Ashkenazi” (232). In Sidney, Smith found a connection to the Jewish peoples’ history of displacement and survival, the necessity of adaptation, and the capacity to build meaning in unfamiliar soil. Where Grant gave Smith her moral and intellectual grounding, Sidney gave her the genetic memory of a lineage in which she found spiritual affinity.

Together, the two men embody the memoir’s central preoccupation with identity. Paternal parentage, the memoir suggests, is both biological and chosen, and the self is the sum of both inheritances, braided together in ways that cannot always be separated.

Smith portrays her husband, Fred (1948-1994), guitarist of the MC5 and one of the architects of Detroit rock, as the person who most fundamentally redirected her life: “abstract, futuristic, with the hands of a musician, a mathematician, a magician” (124). Their connection, formed while she was touring on the West Coast, was immediate. She describes being drawn away from the machinery of celebrity and toward a life built around shared purpose by “an intoxication of a love that eclipsed fame and fortune” (145).

Smith’s portrait of their years together in Michigan is the memoir’s most intimate section. The household they built near Lake St. Clair was full of literature, music, and imaginative freedom. Their creative collaboration is rendered as elevating and protective: “the same unshakable love and loyalty created an aura about us” (187). Fred’s interior life was so expansive that their deepest exchanges required no language at all: “We did not speak of them; we lived them” (124).

Fred’s illness and death constitute the memoir’s most profound rupture. His decline brought Smith’s most trenchant moment of Seeing the Transcendent in the Mundane: A fisherman catching and releasing a record muskie was freighted with symbolic weight about the grace and pain of letting go. Fred’s death bereaved Smith and collapsed her entire framework of meaning. She came to believe, however, that Fred’s influence transformed with his death: His presence shaped her as a wife and mother, while his absence shapes her as an artist. Channeling grief into creative expression, Smith carried forward Fred’s memory in the 1996 album Gone Again, which was dedicated to him.