She wished that her father had been a coal miner and her mother had been a coal miner’s wife so she would have something to write about. Instead her father was a lawyer and her mother was a kindergarten teacher and she tried to avoid letting the people around her find that out. She told them she was from West Virginia and let their imaginations do the rest. Once when her father was in the hospital she told a friend her father was in the hospital and her friend gasped. With the black lung? She didn’t give a verbal reply, just nodded her head. Her father was having an ingrown toenail removed; it ran in the family; her sister had inherited the defect, not her; there was nothing wrong with her at all.