It comes as a shock to those who have known me only in my adult incarnation, but I was a fussy eater. My mother even recorded this fact for posterity, under the "I like!" page in my "I'm a Girl" baby book.

"(15 months): baked potatoes, carrots, green beans, squash, all kinds of fruit and particularly my fruit and orange juice.
(20 months): I eat only meat and fruit and practically no vegetables.
3 yrs. old: I like only hamburgers + fruit."

(And don't fault my mom for writing about me in the first person. The book encouraged this, with headings such as "I like" and "I don't" and "I laughed." By the way, the notation next to the last one reads: "I think I've always done that." How I love having that piece of information. Do people even keep baby books any more?)

In grade school, it was pretty much still hamburgers, and please make them plain, a request that brought McDonald's and Hot Shoppes Jrs. to a standsill. No milk, only chocolate-flavored milk, and it had to be Sealtest. Green salad, lettuce only, dressed with my mother's oil-and-vinegar. Oh, I was a joy.

But my parents were pretty easy-going, although they would implement various rules to see if they could shake me out of my narrow ways. Clean your plate, for one. And then there was "you-must-try-everything, at least a bite." So one Thanksgiving weekend, as we ate leftovers, I was told to try sweet potatoes AND to clean my plate. They seemed repulsive to me, so I had the brainstorm of mixing them with my rice. I was then told I must eat every bite. I sat at the table, tears streaming down my face, struggling with every bite. We had a Scottish terrier, but I never dared sneaking my plate to her. My mother took pity eventually and let me go.

"Children's days rise and fall according to what's for dinner." That's my memory of a line from Marilyn French's The Women's Room. Actually, she wrote: "To children, food was everything, she thought. Their whole evening rose or fell according to what they were to have for dinner."

I came pretty close, perhaps because I've read the book so many times; my copy is falling apart, the binding broken, pages coming out. A younger friend recently professed amazement at my affection for the book, and I suppose it's badly dated. But the early sections, about the day-to-day lives of the women in Mira's suburb, strike me as revolutionary. The line about dinner comes from a day in the life of Adele, who has five children. It is truly epic, a story of misadventures and more misadventures, with mom spiraling out of control even as she tries not to.

It's enough to make you wish you had eaten your sweet potatoes. Or cleaned your room. Or not attempted that flying experiment from the roof.

Eating habits, childhood mistakes, your own mother's epic days -- take it away.