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tended toward intellectual pursuits. I ended up drifting in and out of both worlds, for the most part comfortable in each, but for very different reasons. The WASP world provided a tenuous but important link with my past; the intellectual world, however, became the sustaining part of my existence and a strong foundation for my academic future.
    T
he past was indeed the past. The comfortable world of the military and Washington was gone: everything had changed. My brother had gone off to college before we moved to California,leaving a large hole in my security net. My relationship with my sister, always a difficult one, had become at best fractious, often adversarial, and, more usually, simply distant. She had far more trouble than I did in adjusting to California, but we never really spoke much about it. We went almost entirely our separate ways, and, for all the difference it made, we could have been living in different houses. My parents, although still living together, were essentially estranged. My mother was busy teaching, looking after all of us, and going to graduate school; my father was caught up in his scientific work. His moods still, on occasion, soared; and, when they did, the sparkle and gaiety that flew out from them created a glow, a warmth and joy that filled all of the rooms of the house. He sailed over the cusp of reason at times, and his grandiose ideas started to push the limits of what Rand could tolerate. At one point, for example, he came up with a scheme that assigned IQ scores to hundreds of individuals, most of whom were dead. The reasoning was ingenious but disturbingly idiosyncratic; it also had absolutely nothing to do with the meteorology research that he was being paid to conduct.
    With his capacity for flight came grimmer moods, and the blackness of his depressions filled the air as pervasively as music did in his better periods. Within a year or so of moving to California, my father’s moods were further blackening, and I felt helpless to affect them. I waited and waited for the return of the laughter and high moods and awesome enthusiasms, but, except for rare appearances, they had given way to anger, despair, and bleak emotional withdrawal. After a while, I scarcely recognized him. At times he was immobilized by depression, unable to get out of bed, and profoundlypessimistic about every aspect of his life and future. At other times, his rage and screaming would fill me with terror. I had never known my father—a soft-spoken and gentle man—to raise his voice. Now there were days, and even weeks, when I was frightened to show up for breakfast or come home from school. He also started drinking heavily, which made everything worse. My mother was as bewildered and frightened as I was, and both of us increasingly sought escape through work and friends. I spent even more time than usual with my dog; our family had adopted her as a stray puppy when we lived in Washington, and she and I went everywhere together. She slept on my bed at night and listened for hours to my tales of woe. She was, like most dogs, a good listener, and there were many nights when I would cry myself to sleep with my arms around her neck. She, my boyfriend, and my new friends made it possible for me to survive the turmoil of my home life.
    I soon found out that it was not just my father who was given to black and chaotic moods. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, it became clear that my energies and enthusiasms could be exhausting to the people around me, and after long weeks of flying high and sleeping little, my thinking would take a downward turn toward the really dark and brooding side of life. My two closest friends, both males—attractive, sardonic, and intense—were a bit inclined to the darker side as well, and we became an occasionally troubled trio, although we managed to navigate the more normal and fun-loving side of high school as well. Indeed, all of us were in various school leadership positions and