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Ani DiFranco on Growing Up in a House With No Walls
I knew families who would’ve done great in a log cabin, but my family was not one of those
The house I grew up in had no walls, except, of course, around the outside. Also around the boiler in the middle of the first floor and the little bathroom in the middle of the second floor. My mother, whose idea the whole doughnut-house thing was, wanted to create a log cabin feel in a carriage house in North Buffalo. She was fresh out of the MIT School of Architecture (a woman pioneering in an all-male world) and freshly married to my father, whom she had met at school. He was a returning student, the first in his immigrant family to go to college. He had come back to school to upgrade from builder to engineer. He was 10 years older and a foot shorter than she, and, as a couple, they were at least memorable and likely irresistible. They were like an intellectual’s I Love Lucy show: the wide-eyed redhead in her life-of-the-party dress and her dark and exasperated sidekick with a steady love behind each shrug. They had Lucy and Desi’s charm—and their secret unhappiness, too.
I knew families who would’ve done great in a log cabin. Families who slapped each other with towels when they were naked and laughed and sought each other’s company. But my family was not one of those. My…
