The Greatest Lie Part 17

They say that life is about making choices. But we humans don't get to choose the two most important factors in our lives. We don't get to choose our genes, so I got stuck with XY chromosomes. And we don't get to choose our natal families, so I got stuck with my mother and father.

My father, Eduardo Rios, is a handsome, renowned AIDS researcher. My mother, Katrina Eriksson, is a beautiful and vivacious doyenne of talk show pop psychology. I am a child prodigy. I suppose, if you could choose a family, you might mistakenly choose mine. And if parents could pick their babies, I could even suppose two loving parents might mistakenly pick me. "Caveat emptor." You never know what you're getting until it's too late.

When Eduardo and Katrina met, my mom was a Swedish foreign student eager to reject the boring moral certainties of Stockholm. My father was a refugee from Pinochet's right wing purge in Chile. They hooked up as grad students at Berkeley in the late seventies, radical politics blended with wanderlust, spiced with cocaine- and Quaalude-laced Seventies disco fever.

Twenty years and a generation passed. Their baby boomer cohort, once skinny, radical hippies, had evolved, first into the dressed-for-success yuppies of the Eighties and then into conservative, overweight religious stalwarts of the second Bush administration. My father had become a conference and bed-hopping academic research superstar. He had parlayed his role on the UCLA team that had isolated HIV into a sinecure with the permanent perquisite of seducing the prettiest of his graduate students. My mom had traded her Nordic good looks and tenured post in USC's psych department into an afternoon TV talk show on Fox. There, she blathers to menopausal woman about cherishing and nurturing their inner pre-adolescent selves.

They led parallel lives as minor celebrities, and expected their brilliant child to retrace the footsteps of their bourgeois success, but to forego their youthful peregrinations.