A brilliant personal history from the award-winning author of `The Corrections`. Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. `The Discomfort Zone` is his intimate memoir of his growth from a `small and fundamentally ridiculous person` through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It`s also a portrait of a middle class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America has taken an angry turn away from its mid-century ideals. The stories told here draw on elements as varied as the effects of Kafka`s fiction on Franzen`s protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother`s house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds. These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen`s fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, Franzen narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.