The narrator describes how, when she was 27, she decided to end her life by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. She recalls how Lenny said, “One thing about hard times […] Once you hit bottom, things can only get better” (ix). She couldn’t bring herself to let go of the world, but she couldn’t go home. That is how she ended up at the Bird Hotel.

Two weeks before her seventh birthday, the narrator learns from the television that her mother is dead. Her grandmother says people will be looking for them, so they move, and Grammy changes the narrator’s name from Joan to Irene, using paperwork from a friend whose granddaughter died. A box arrives, labeled in her mother’s handwriting, of her mother’s favorite vinyl records. At school, Irene tells classmates that her mother is a famous singer who is away recording albums. She loved when her mother sang to her at night, especially when she sang old ballads. Diana had a succession of boyfriends, one of whom, Indigo, threw young Irene into the pool and gave her a fear of water. The boyfriend Irene liked was Daniel, a nurse. Irene thinks her mother “was a person who needed a man at her side, and she never had any trouble finding one” (6).