A debut literary memoir reckoning with the costs of starting a new life in a different city amidst a family history of poverty, crime, and addiction.

Nicole Treska was born to a family of gangsters. Her paternal grandfather, Papa Treska, once owned Christie’s, a Boston diner known in Somerville as the hangout of reputed crime boss, Whitey Bulger, and the Winter Hill Gang. Her father, Phil, using his strolls through the neighborhood as a decoy, sold drugs for Whitey’s operation, out of the stroller he pushed Nicole around in.

After the death of her paternal aunt, Nicole—now a writer, adjunct professor at City College, and waitress who rents out the second bedroom of her Harlem apartment to European tourists to make ends meet—returns to the town that afforded her family its street cred but has taken away everything else. It’s in Boston that she reunites with her father and is reminded of why she left in the first place, but also why she returned. It’s this ethos that grounds the book as we watch Nicole admirably hustle to afford not just the life she wants for herself, but one that includes her surviving family members.

If the American Dream means transcending one’s circumstances at the expense of alienating one’s sense of belonging, identity, and family, then Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard and Breaking Even is the reality that resonates with those who believe success isn’t achieved individually but realized communally.