In the town of Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley, every day
brings sunshine and progress, and everything is supposed to work out
okay. Not surprisingly, this thoughtful and deeply effecting memoir
tells the story of a family that falls apart (or rather "off the Norman
Rockwell easel") in the midst of this fantasy. When Mrs. Goodell
decides to get a divorce, she blasts off from Planet Marriage and
hitches her future to the embryonic Apple Computer company. The other
family members, however, quickly unravel. Jeff, the oldest son, quits
his Apple job for the casinos of Lake Tahoe, fully believing he is
"leaving behind a bunch of nerdy machine heads who were destined to
live small, narrow lives empty of romance or mystery." His father, a
landscape architect and a family man devastated by the divorce, finds
himself becoming an anachronism in the Silicon Valley chip-and-code
culture. And the sensitive youngest son, Jerry, plunges into drugs,
alcohol, and sexual experimentation.