Marin County appears as both a lived landscape and a place of inquiry: the narrator’s account moves from a dinner that leads him toward Karen Barbour, to a cabin near Inverness where the family spends time outdoors, and to his interviews with psychologist Judith Wallerstein about the effects of divorce on children. The county’s natural setting offers room for family life, while its connection to Wallerstein’s work brings the consequences of family arrangements into focus.

Setting and Community

The memoir associates Marin County with a coastal landscape and a close-knit local community. Karen Barbour has a small cabin in a garden in Inverness, not far from town. The narrator describes the surrounding area as a place whose community and natural beauty become more compelling the longer the family spends there.

Their routines make that setting concrete. They carry an old canoe to Papermill Creek and paddle among river otters; at high tide they head toward an inlet on the bay, go ashore for picnics, and find Miwok arrowheads on the rocky beach. Trails cross national seashore and state parkland, changing with the seasons: wildflowers bloom in spring, while midsummer brings dry golden fields, ripe blackberries, and blue irises. In winter, the family hikes in the rain or along the beaches and watches migrating gray whales.

Family Life Near Inverness

The waters and beaches around the peninsula become part of Nic’s changing relationship with the outdoors. He had rarely chosen the beach because he disliked getting sandy, but he begins spending as much time as possible near or in the water. At McClure’s Beach, the family walks among tide pools and searches for mussels, sea stars, anemones, and octopi. At Limantour Beach, Nic follows Karen Barbour into the cold ocean in December; in Tomales Bay, the two swim and play together.

These episodes place the family’s everyday life within a landscape that invites shared activity: paddling, hiking, exploring the shore, and swimming. The contrast between Nic’s earlier reluctance and his later eagerness to be in the water gives the setting a role in the narrative beyond scenery; it records a change in how he participates in family life.

Karen Barbour’s Connection to the County

Marin County also enters the story through Karen Barbour’s family ties. In 1989, at a friend’s dinner party, the narrator meets her while she is visiting her parents in Marin County from Manhattan. She is a painter who also writes and illustrates children’s books. The next day, the narrator calls her at her parents’ house. This meeting begins a relationship that later becomes associated with the family’s time at the cabin near Inverness.

The two settings mark different points in that relationship: the visit to her parents’ home is part of their first encounter, while the cabin becomes a place where the family spends as much time as possible. The memoir does not present Marin County only as a destination; it is woven into the circumstances of how the narrator and Karen Barbour meet and the life they later share.

Wallerstein’s Work and the County’s Narrative Role

The county is also the setting for the narrator’s reporting on Judith Wallerstein, a child psychologist who founded the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition in Marin County. The narrator interviews her for a magazine article about divorce. Wallerstein’s long-term research followed children whose parents had divorced in the early 1970s, with repeated interviews over the following decades. Her findings challenged the assumption that children would necessarily be happier when their parents were happier: many struggled with depression, school, and relationships, and some continued to have difficulty years after the separation.

The narrator later meets Wallerstein at her wood-shingle house in Belvedere, overlooking the bay and the Tiburon waterfront. He asks specifically about joint custody across long distances, a question shaped by Nic’s own divided family life. Wallerstein describes children moving between homes and, in some cases, experiencing those homes as unstable or having to maintain parallel lives across distance. Her work does not make Marin County the cause of the family’s difficulties; rather, the county is where the narrator encounters an expert whose research helps him consider the emotional costs of custody arrangements.

Together, these strands give Marin County a double significance in the memoir. Its coast and sheltered waterways frame family activities and Nic’s growing engagement with the outdoors; its connection to Wallerstein’s center and home provides a setting for the narrator’s examination of divorce and childhood. The landscape offers a place for shared life, while the reporting conducted there presses the narrator to reckon with how fragile a child’s sense of home can be.