Includes bibliographical references (page ix).

The ordinary world never made sense to Amanda, who grew up certain her friends and family would die or disappear if she quit watching them, compulsively treating every parting as a final good-bye. Shuttled between divorced parents, from a barefoot bohemian existence in Greenwich Village to a sanitized, stricter world uptown, this smart, sensitive little girl experienced life through the distorting lens of an undiagnosed panic disorder. Her darkly funny memoir is at once a love letter to 1970-80s New York City, a coming-of-age story of an anxious, unusually perceptive child, and a window into adult life and relationships lived on the razor's edge of panic.