In this wonderfully evocative, emotional memoir, Maura Conlon-McIvor strives to bridge the emotional chasm that often exists between fathers and daughters with her poignant, humorous, and occasionally heartbreaking reminiscing about her childhood . As indicated by the subtitle, Conlon-McIvor's book describes "How I Learned to Crack My Father's Code," and in it she reveals with all the urgency of a schoolgirl how she went about attempting to understand her quiet, often taciturn father:

"I lie in bed at night with my yellow daisy sheets up to my nose, and Dad comes into my bedroom to snap shut my window. He does not explain why he locks everything up, but I have figured it out: The world is full of criminals, and it is the job of my father, Special Agent Joe Conlon, to keep them out of our house."

Originally from New York, Conlon's Irish Catholic parents moved to sunny California (near Hollywood, no less), when Maura's FBI agent father, Joe, was transferred to the Los Angeles office of the agency. There they settled into something approximating a sort of Irish suburbia: near a Catholic church and a Catholic school (both attended by the Conlons) and with a number of Irish Catholic neighbors nearby. At least ostensibly, they were the ideal Irish-American family: Dad loves baseball (even so much so as to change his allegiance to the local Angels, since the underdogs need someone to root for them); Mom handles the house and writes to complain when the pre-packaged donuts they purchase are stale; and the kids live a fairly carefree existence.

Some might find such a bucolic scene to be the ideal illusion, and a novelist might well create a father who is secretly abusive, a wife who is having an affair, and children who are off "discovering themselves" in the tempestuous sixties. Conlon's narrative is not so fantastic, however, and she makes no effort to paint her childhood as some sort of traumatic experience that required decades of therapy to overcome. Instead, she peels back the facade to show not merely the uncertainty and disfunction that might exist inside any home, but also the broader realities of virtually all relationships between children and their parents.

Like the prototypical G-Man, Maura's father carried himself with a careful, quiet assurance and a reticence that often descended into a painful silence and unwillingness to speak, traits that masked an apparent inability to emotionally connect with his family. As a young child, Conlon struggled to understand why her father wouldn't talk, and for the longest time she was convinced that it related to his job - that somehow, he was professionally required to speak in a sort of cipher, a code that only agents understood and that if she could break it, she would be able to connect with him. As she writes: