My mom wasn't quite so extreme but we do go for psychic workshops and looking for UFOs. I was raised with this neopagan and New Age value system which was the complete opposite of how I was raised with my dad and stepmother. There are moments of humor, but I think overall the book has a feeling of sad yearning. It's about me older looking back with a nostalgia for that, knowing it's not a feasible way to live, but it is sweet. I've seen a couple of your performance pieces when you were in Chicago and it had an exhibitionist edge to it.
People always see first novels as autobiographical and that is certainly an impulse in writing.
One thing that happened though was midway through the book I started writing porn for different sorts of markets. Porn was great for breaking that autobiographical young writer habit. When writing lesbian or transgender porn I had to really fictionalize and completely create from the bottom up. It's important to tap into the autobiographical emotional impulse, but if you want to tell a good story it must be structured and have certain fictional elements. I applied a lot of what I learned in porn back into the book and what might have been more exhibitionist was sacrificed or reworked for the sake of telling a better story.