Outline

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty and disordered eating.

Faye, the first-person narrator and the protagonist of the book, is a novelist, perhaps in her late thirties or forties. Faye got a divorce three years ago and has recently moved with her two sons to London, England. For the last 10 years, Faye lived in a home in the country; the loss of her marriage, the idyll of the nuclear family, and finally the family home strike her as a series of severe losses. After her husband left, the home in the countryside became “the grave of something [she] could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion” (10). This shows that the changes in her life have been traumatizing for Faye. 

As the novel begins, Faye leaves for a week-long trip to Athens, Greece, to teach a writing workshop entitled “How to Write.” Although the students are Greek, they are supposed to write in English for the purpose of the workshop. To Faye, the language in which her students write does not matter since the “loss of transition bec[omes] the gain of simplicity” (17). This suggests that Faye has an open-minded attitude to writing and creativity, not believing that these should be straitjacketed by rules and conventions.