Childhood

What you need to know before your trail

Thomas MacMillan is a man on a mission – he wants to pierce together the strange and unspoken facts of his “singular childhood.” Abandoned at birth to the erratic care of his grandmother, he is reclaimed at age 10, with little fanfare, by his mother and mentored in adolescence by her boyfriend, the eccentric and learned Henry Wing.

As he grows up however, Thomas cultivates a hunger for the things he wasn’t told as a child. As he writes of the mystery of his unpredictable but not unloving mother, “ignorance has brought the only lasting passion I’ve known…. I might have loved my mother less if I’d known her better.”

This is the story of his search and of what he found.