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A Normal Life
A Memoir
Kim Rich
Author of Johnny’s Girl
Text © 2018 by Kim Rich
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 9781943328505 (paperback)
ISBN 9781943328512 (e-book)
ISBN 9781943328529 (hardbound)
Edited by Carol Sturgulewski
Front Cover: background by dikobraziy/Shutterstock.com
Back Cover: author photography by Karley Nugent
Published by Alaska Northwest Books®
An imprint of
Graphic Arts Books
Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens
Marketing Manager: Angela Zbornik
Editor: Olivia Ngai
Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger
For Charlotte, Kristan & Mary
Contents
Chapter 2: Peaceful, Easy Feeling
Chapter 3: The “Hey, Wow, Man” School
Chapter 4: Living Back to Nature Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
Chapter 5: A Warm Hat, a Whale, and a C in Chemistry
Chapter 6: A Normal Life, Round One
Chapter 9: The Writing Division
Chapter 10: Circling the Center
Chapter 12: Grandpa and the Gypsies
Chapter 15: A Normal Life, Round Two
Chapter 17: When You Wish Upon a Star
Introduction
This book is for my children. But it is about me and, more important, about my generation. It is about the time when I grew up—the 1960s and 1970s.
My peers and I are not Baby Boomers (though demographers lump us together), nor are we Generation X. We grew up around stay-at-home moms, proud homemakers. We graduated high school expecting to have high-powered, successful careers instead.
I like to think of us as the Transitional Generation, too young to rebel and be hippies but too old to be on the forefront of the digital revolution. Some of us dressed like hippies, but few of my friends actually went off to live on a commune or got on “the bus.” But we read about it. Some of us even aspired to it—for a while.
This book also serves another purpose—to pick up where my first memoir left off. My book Johnny’s Girl captured my unconventional childhood as the only child of a professional gambler, John F. “Johnny” Rich, and my beautiful and doomed mother, Frances “Ginger” Chiaravalle Rich. My parents were both the black sheep of their respective families, and both died tragically and young.
My mother, a sometimes exotic dancer who aspired to be a model, spent most of her life in a state mental institution. I last saw her, briefly, when I was nine; she died of cancer five years later. My father was murdered a year after that, a victim of his life in Anchorage’s increasingly ruthless underworld. At age fifteen, I became an orphan.
Looking back, it seems only natural that I would become a journalist and writer. That career choice was determined the day I learned my father was dead. On that day, I promised myself, “Someday I will write about him.”
And then I walked away from everything and anyone who had anything to do with him. I was determined to live a normal life—whatever that might be.
After decades of searching for that life, I fulfilled my promise. Johnny’s Girl was published in 1993. It was reviewed by the New York Times and adapted by Hallmark into a TV movie. I can still catch it on cable now and then. The book is still available in paperback.
Johnny’s Girl ends not long after my father’s death. Many people
