It’s a good thing that Mishna Wolff has a background in stand-up comedy, since her late-’80s memoir of growing up poor in Seattle’s Rainier Valley, the eldest child in a blended, interracial family, is essentially a series of coming-of-age vignettes that should benefit from being performed. Her father white, her step-sibs and stepmother black (as were daddy’s many preceding girlfriends), young Mishna is never sure where she stands in I’m Down (new in paper). Her father, for reasons left unexplained, identifies culturally with African Americans. Her divorced birth mother, seen mainly on weekend visits, is a TV-hating white hippie. And her age peers alternately taunt her for being a cracker or—if she does too well in school—stuck up. But the class/racial divide works both ways. Admitted a gifted program, the author recalls, “Unlike my classmates, I didn’t know about algebra, or Shakespeare, or lacrosse, or Lacoste.” Though she learns how to neatly braid her black stepsister’s hair, looming adolescence brings conflict with her stepmother. (“Just because I don’t like Jody Watley does not make me a racist!”) Wolff’s account—inevitably being developed as a screenplay at Sundance—stops short of high school, but not before her ambitions (swimming, college, etc.) place her among new friends who are wealthy and white. With not a little disgust, Wolff notes that they have the luxury to be depressed. BRIAN MILLER

Sat., June 26, 2 p.m., 2010