As a teenager, Alison’s mom, Alicia, painted the Wonderland characters on every wall of her home, insisting that they were real and talked to her in dreams. Years later, Alicia took a flying leap out of her second-story hospital room window to test her “wings,” just a few hours after giving birth to my mom. She landed in a rosebush and broke her neck. Some say she committed suicide—postpartum depression and grief over losing her husband months earlier in a factory accident. Others say she should’ve been locked away long before she had a child.
