The story opens with a snippet of a 1987 Vanity Fair article about the main character’s grandmother, Althea Proserpine, an author whose single published book earned her “an odd kind of fame” (1). After her publication, Althea raised her daughter, Ella, in a reclusive estate called the Hazel Wood. Ella grew up to become the mother of protagonist Alice. Alice is 17 as the story opens, and she explains her backstory: She and Ella lived largely “like vagrants, staying with friends till our welcome wore though at the elbows, perching in precarious places, then moving on” (3). Bad luck seemed to chase Ella and Alice to new landing sites, where they settled hesitantly until the next bout of misfortune uprooted them again. When Alice was six, a redhaired man in a Blue Buick briefly kidnapped her, claiming he was taking her to see her grandmother. Ella said after Alice’s rescue that he was just a fan using Alice to try to see Althea, but Alice wondered for a few years if the man was actually her unknown father.

One day “the year [Alice] turned seventeen” (3), Ella receives a strange letter typed on an old typewriter announcing that her mother, Althea, died.