individuality

Despite a warm relationship with her mother, stepfather, and half brother, sixteen-year-old Kim feels the need to find answers about the Japanese American father she never knew.

Tina Malhotra, a sophomore at the Yarborough Academy in Southern California, creates an existential diary for an honors English assignment in which she tries to determine who she is and where she fits in.

After her family loses their cottage in the Los Angeles hills, junior high school outcast Weetzie Bat's father leaves her mother and Weetzie learns how to stand up for herself and to find beauty in even the most difficult situations.

Sweet leaves her family and goes to live in a cabin in the woods with the quiet but understanding Curtis, to whom she feels intensely connected, just as he is called back to serve again in Iraq.

In 1974 when her father leaves New Delhi, India, to seek a job in New York, Ashi, a tomboy at the advanced age of sixteen, feels thwarted in the home of her extended family in Calcutta where she, her mother, and sister must stay, and when her father dies before he can send for them, they must remain with their relatives and observe the old-fashioned traditions that Ashi hates.

Fifteen-year-old Carly's summer volunteer experience makes her feel more real than her life of privilege in Atlanta ever did, but her younger sister starts high school pretending to be what she is not, and both find their relationships suffering.

Abandoned by her drug-addicted mother at the age of eleven, high school student Taylor Markham struggles with her identity and family history at a boarding school in Australia.

Sixteen-year-old Emma Healy has never felt that she fit in with the rest of her family, so when she discovers that she had a twin brother who died shortly after they were born, she takes off on an impulsive road trip to try to discover who she really is.

Beck Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old party planner, suddenly questions her identity and attempts to regain the youthful wisdom she had before she was swept into marriage by a charismatic older divorcee--and father of three--thirty years ago.

The author describes her theories of evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and linguistics to show how the development of the relationship, socialization, and status systems creates personality.