My writer's name might be Pythia, but upon my birth in 1951 to my two greatest generation dreamer-parents, Altoona-born Joe Carroll, and Sheila, a beautiful, black-haired, blue-eyed girl from Buenos Aires, I was christened with the unlikely name of Pellman Sharon Carroll—a name that bound me to my father's fate. My first name was after my father's foster father who'd raised him during the Depression, Pellman Glover, and Sharon was after the Valley of Sharon in Israel, where family lore had it I'd been conceived (and therein lies the tale that spun my new memoir). My parents raised me and my three siblings on a bucolic farm outside of Kansas City, where my aviator father had taken a job with TWA; at 19 I dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco to live the communal hippy dream; after moving in 1981 with my husband and three sons to Santa Fe and living in my first house, I began to write as a freelance journalist—probably my greatest claim to fame is my interview with George R.R. Martin in his pre-Game-of-Throne, struggling author days! Not long after, my family moved to the Washington, DC area, where I got divorced, then focused on my work as a "depth journalist" writing about psychological and spiritual perspectives on political and social issues. Today my sons are grown, and as a reward for raising three boys, Fate graced me with three lovely daughter-in-law and a lovely granddaughter, Eslyn, so that I can now proudly add "grandmother" to my bio. Besides blogging for The Huffington Post and Psychology Today, I'm also the author of two new books: AMERICAN ICARUS, an intimate memoir of my difficult, alcoholic, aviator-father,our relationship, and his redemptive, Hospice-guided death, and AMERICA ON THE COUCH, a collection of interviews with 37 psychologists on the American psyche, including violence, addiction, the environment, capitalism, politics, and the soul of America.