When she was a small child Elaine felt as though she had been wrapped in plastic from head to toe, nothing coming in. Her little world stayed the same, unchanging during a great Depression, and even though the country was suffering, the only glimmer of anything important to her was the fact that her mother's family - Elaine's grandmother, aunt and two uncles - had moved into her family's small apartment and were living in her suddenly crowded space. From the Great Depression to World War II, through the traumas, frustrations and fears of being at war, the hazards of high school, hers was still a lonely plastic-wrapped environment. Then she entered Northwestern University and in those four years the universe opened up. She ran away with her college roommate to New York for a writing career, without her parents' knowledge or consent, plunging unsuspecting, inexperienced, into the maelstrom of post World War II New York and ended up as an editor for a comic book publishing company. Growing up finally, it was possible to make a sort of peace, long distance, with her family.