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town house across from American University, a community called Westover Place, to the white brick Georgian house on Lowell Street across from the Mexican Embassy, where we held Fourth of July block parties and Halloween parties with the neighbors. Local firemen drove their trucks down to let us kids honk the horn and sound the sirens. We attended Christmas parties and birthday parties with guests named (Joe and Jim) Biden, (Arianna) Huffington, and (David) Rubenstein—before they carried the power they do today.
    For my tenth birthday party, my mother hired a wild-animal trainer. He arrived dressed in safari gear and brought a wild alligator for us to play with. I didn’t care about any of the other wild animals he brought, like the African dwarf frogs and baby goats. I spent the entire afternoon chasing that wild alligator around the playroom in my plaid skirt while the mothers were upstairs in the family room gossiping over bottles of Pinot Grigio, Carr’s crackers, and caviar.
    When we moved from the city to our estate in Virginia, our birthday parties and Christmases became even more extravagant as my parents’ wealth grew along with their position in the social hierarchy of Washington.
    One year, the Woman’s Club of McLean selected our home to showcase Christmas decorations and interior design as part of the Holiday Homes Tour. (One of the others chosen was Merrywood, the fifty-acre estate on which Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy grew up.) It was a tour where wealthy women wore booties on their shoes as they walked around the decorated mansions oohing and aahing at the décor with the comfort that the money they donated would go toward a designated charity.
    For weeks, my mother and the interior designers spent all day hanging red ribbons and green wreaths from each window above the green boxwood bushes and lush ivy. Candles shimmered in the center of each windowsill. White lights swirled around the Corinthian columns illuminating the front door, making it look like a winter wonderland when it snowed. Inside, the house smelled of cinnamon and vanilla, poinsettias clumped in every corner of every room next to antiques, and mistletoe swung in the loggia. Each room a vision of warm perfection. My mother had come to develop the most sophisticated and exquisite taste, moving further and further away from her laid-back California upbringing.
    I was fourteen years old, and I’ll never forget the gifts I received that year on Christmas morning. Stacks of presents covered the lower third of our twelve-foot Christmas tree in red-and-white Santa wrapping paper. But before we opened presents, we had already been led by footprints made from fake snow down into the playroom to find a Ping-Pong table and a pool table placed under the hanging green Tiffany lamps. The room was big enough for both.
    My father had given me a $2,000 steel watch from Tiffany and had bought me a background role on my favorite TV show, Dawson’s Creek . He bid the most money during the silent auction at a charity event for the Choral Arts Society of Washington. Eight weeks later, on my fifteenth birthday, my father flew me in his Beechcraft King Air twin turboprop down to Wilmington, North Carolina, where they filmed the show. I hung out on set all day with stars Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson and had them autograph my yellow North Face backpack.
    During those years, we had nannies and housekeepers, painters and gardeners, private chefs and academic tutors. And every six months, it seemed, I’d come home from school to see the newest model of a red or black Porsche being driven off the flatbed of a truck. I’d see Dad standing in the driveway in his white polo and khakis, his arms in the air, directing the landing of the Porsche safely onto the gravel.
    My father insisted on buying sports cars with manual transmissions only. “Automatic is for sissies,” he would say. My BMW was a stick shift, and when I asked him why