Book excerpt: The world of the Robson family is a complicated mixture of suffocation and strength, and Claire's parents' lives are as small and safe as they can make them. A mother who wants her daughter to fulfill her own dreams and a daughter who wants to be everything her mother is not--both may love each other, but neither understands the other. Claire Robson escapes her village and her family through a scholarship to university, where she easily becomes a hippie, marries the son of a family far wealthier than her own, and plunges headlong into domesticity. But before long she leaves her husband and rides her motorcycle straight into the lesbian community to become first a squatter, then a school principal. This memoir reads like a novel, and is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreakingly poignant. It is a coming out story that tackles the trade-offs some gay people make after they leave the closet and choose acceptance instead of activism, work instead of sex, success instead of happiness, and silence instead of truth. While this may not seem to be everyone's story, the author's courage, honesty, warmth, and humor make it an unquestionably universal one.