Excerpt from In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After finishing his military service, Bill started to feel unwell. He had contracted tuberculosis in China and spent two years at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Queens. Journalism was not an easy profession to enter, and upon discharge he went for a safer option, training as a teacher at Fordham. When he met a tall, determined young woman five years his junior with red hair and an open face, one who shared his passion for self-improvement, he felt that at last everything was falling into place. Bill Colvin and Rosemarie Marron were married at St. Luke's Church in the South Bronx. She wore a long white silk dress with a scalloped neckline and carried a bouquet of lilies. He was in a morning suit and striped cravat, his hair shining with pomade. They went to Bermuda on their honeymoon and started their family immediately.

Bill Colvin was a dedicated and, by all accounts, exemplary English teacher, spending his entire career at Forest Hills High School, in Queens. He led a Boy Scout troop and was active in local politics, but he never lost his youthful passion for writing. Like millions of Americans, he responded to an advertisement in The New York Times Book Review for a correspondence course at the Famous Writers School, in Westport, Connecticut, which promised to "teach you to write successfully at home," holding out the possibility of "financial success and independence" as a writer. The application form he completed in 1967 reveals a lot about the father against whom Marie would soon rebel. His main ambition, he said, was "to be a good person, lead a full life and create something with beauty and meaning before I die." Interests: politics and reading. Favorite classroom subjects: English and philosophy. Favorite writers: Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and Shakespeare. His chosen magazines and newspapers were Good Housekeeping; the Jesuit weekly magazine, America; and the Oyster Bay Guardian. "Maybe I just want to wrestle with eternal conflicts on paper," he wrote in a piece about why he wanted to write, but more may have been revealed in a story he wrote about a teacher, who just happened to be called Bill. "Society won't accept a man simply as a teacher," he wrote. "He must really be something else in order to justify his existence."

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Marie's sister Aileen, nicknamed Boo, was born in 1960. Four years later, just before Marie turned nine, Rosemarie gave birth to her fifth and final child, Cathleen, always known as Cat. Marie had taken little interest in the birth of her other siblings, but she was enchanted by the new baby. The feeling never faded, and from the moment she could toddle, Cat was Marie's shadow. As the eldest, Marie had a small room of her own, on the first floor. Cat remembers lying in Marie's bed playing "postage stamp kisses," a game her big sister invented. "She would tell me a story about a place—Brazil, maybe, or China—with parties and dancing women or Amazon queens. Then she would give me as many kisses as hours it took to get there by plane to send me to my dreams."

Life for the Colvin kids took place largely "down the hill" at the back of the house. Bill mobilized the fathers of the neighborhood to dig out the sandy slope, shoring up the retaining wall at the top with old tires and creating a flat play area at the bottom, where they planted ivy, honey locust, and dogwood trees. There the neighborhood kids and Marie's siblings trailed in the slipstream of her enthusiasm. She was not only the oldest, but also tall, wiry, strong, and game for anything. With her shock of dark curls and her determined manner, she commanded attention. "She was the person to follow," says her brother Michael. "I thought if I tagged along with Marie, everything would be fine."

Their favorite game was Dead Man's Branch. "We each had our own tree," recalls Billy. "You had to climb out along a branch to see whose would break first." Invariably, it was Marie who pushed out farthest. If her branch broke and she took a tumble, she'd just pick herself up and find another branch. On the whole, though, the other kids would have given up long before she reached the flimsy end. The game appealed not only to Marie's physical bravery but also to her competitiveness: she liked to win. When the first snows fell, the neighborhood fathers would carve out a snaking toboggan run, which, when the grown-ups were safely out of sight, Billy would douse with water to ice it up so the toboggan went faster. When she was about ten, Marie careered full tilt into an oak tree, breaking her nose and splitting open her forehead. She was taken to the hospital and ended up with a scar. It was one of the rare occasions when the Colvin children ran for help—their parents' rule was that you could come home in tears only if you were bleeding.

Excerpted from In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum. Copyright © 2018 by Lindsey Hilsum. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.