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My last name should be ‘‘Eickhoff ’’ not ‘‘Adams.’’ After having two children in the early 1950s, my biological grandparents*the Eickhoffs*divorced. My grandmother soon remarried and, adhering to patriarchal custom, changed her name to Adams. The new husband adopted her children, and Eickhoff quickly fell out of Adams family discourse. In 1979 I emerged into the Adams system I would come to know as biological and absent divorce. And I never questioned the constructed family story until a decade after my birth. In 1989 I found my father’s birth certificate in my grandmother’s attic. It listed his name as Eickhoff. I asked Grandma about the error. ‘‘I married an Eickhoff before marrying an Adams,’’ she screamed and demanded that I give her the document. ‘‘Eickhoff divorced me after your father and your father’s sister were born. You cannot tell anyone about this ‘situation’ and you will never speak of it again.’’ The divorce and the Eickhoff name remain Adams family secrets. And while biology doesn’t constitute a family, biology becomes important when people are discussed as if they’re blood relatives (e.g., ‘‘Heart disease runs in our family’’) or as if we’re a family free of divorce. In 2004 I secretly contacted Grandfather Eickhoff. He’s reframed many of my thoughts about the Adamses, in that I now view my constructed-biological relatives as corrupt and mischievous. But since I haven’t told them of my contact with Grandfather Eickhoff, I guess I could be viewed as corrupt and mischievous, too. Adams family secrets continue and relationships suffer. It is such secretive situations that Harold Lloyd Goodall, Jr., in A Need to Know, knows of all too well.

Makagon, D. (2004). Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 268 pp. ISBN 0816642753. $29.95 (cloth). My father owns a restaurant that has ...