Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir | Jennifer Mascia
When Jennifer Mascia is five years old, the FBI comes for her father. At that moment Jenny realizes that her family isnt exactly normal. What follows are months of confusion marked by visits with her father through thick glass, talking to him over a telephone attached to the wall. She and her mother crisscross the country, from California to New York to Miami and back again. When her father finally returns home, months later, his absence is never explainedand Jenny is told that the family has a new last name. Its only much later that Jenny discovers that theirs was a life spent on the lam, trying to outrun the law. Thus begins the story of Jennifer Mascias bizarre but strangely magical childhood. An only child, she revels in her parents intense love for herand rides the highs and lows of their equally passionate arguments. They are a tight-knit band, never allowing many outsiders in. And then there are the oddities that Jenny notices only as she gets older: the fact that her father had two names before he went awayin public he was Frank, but at home her mother called him Johnny; the neat, hidden hole in the carpet where her parents keep all their cash. The family sees wild swings in wealthone year theyre shopping for Chanel and Louis Vuitton at posh shopping centers in Los Angeles, the next theyre living in one room and subsisting on food stamps. What have her parents done? What was the reason for her fathers incarceration so many years ago? When Jenny, at twenty-two, uncovers her fathers criminal record during an Internet search, still more questions are raised. By then he is dying of cancer, so she presses her mother for answers, eliciting the first in a series of reluctant admissions about her fathers criminal past. Before her mother dies, four years later, Jenny is made privy to one final, riveting confession, which sets her on a search for the truth her mother fought to conceal for so many years. As Jenny unravels her familys dark secrets, she must confront the grisly legacy she has inherited and the hard truth that her parents are notand have never beenwho they claimed to be. In the face of unimaginable tragedy, Jenny will ultimately find an acceptance and understanding just as meaningful and powerful as her parents love. In a memoir both raw and unwavering, Jennifer Mascia tells the amazing story of a life livedunwittinglywith criminals. Full of great love and enormous loss, Never Tell Our Business to Strangers will captivate and enthrall, both with its unrelenting revelations and its honest, witty heart. From the Hardcover edition.
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir | 
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