Barrangon, Eloise. How to Travel with Parents (New York: Dial Press, 1956) 242 p.

The narrator’s Aunt Maureen gives her a leather-bound journal to record a vacation trip across the country.

She is a librarian and nice-looking in a wholesome sort of way but she is no femme fatale. She has an unlucky habit of putting plates down on a table with the center of gravity slightly over the edge, but she is jolly about sweeping up the pieces. She goes to foreign films and long-hair concerts and reads Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue when she is under the dryer. But she goes on wearing plain navy blue and perfume that is nothing but lily-of-the-valley and the same color lipstick year after year, medium rose. When we go to see her she makes creamed chicken and waffles. She lives in a two-room apartment in the City and has a heated aquarium of tropical fish which keep eating each other up instead of multiplying. My mother used to invite Aunt Maureen out to our house for dinner quite often to meet any unattached men she could lay her talons on, but nothing ever came of it. (p. 10).

The narrator, a teenaged girl remarks, “Men seldom make passes ... at girls who talk about the Dewey decimal system even if they don’t wear glasses.” (p. 11).

While on vacation out West the narrator and her brother discuss Aunt Maureen.

“What are Aunt Maureen’s salient characteristics?”

I said, “She’s inhibited. Her id is snarled in a clove-hitch.”

Ted said, “She’s prissy and pays cash for everything so she won’t go into debt.” (p. 163).