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 (St. Martin’s, $23.95). 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. (Also: Elliott Bay, 4:30 p.m. Sat. June 27.) BRIAN MILLER

Thu., June 25, 7 p.m.; Sat., June 27, 4:30 p.m., 2009