Content Warning: This guide and its source material briefly describe an attempted death by suicide.

Set in Missouri, The Story of Arthur Truluv opens with Arthur Moses, an 85-year-old widower who lost his wife, Nola, six months prior. Every day, he takes the bus to visit Nola’s grave and talk to her over lunch. He also regularly reads the inscriptions on other graves and tries to imagine what those people’s lives were like. Everything has changed for him after Nola’s death; while he inspects a dandelion, he thinks about how nothing is the same without her: “Seeing the daffodil with Nola gone is not the same, it’s like he’s seeing only part of it” (7). He often sees a young woman sitting in different places around the ceremony and staring off into space. He waves at her one day, but she seems frightened by the gesture, and so he turns away. The narration switches to focus on the girl, 17-year-old Maddy Harris, who skips school to visit the cemetery and take pictures. She finds the cemetery comforting, telling her boyfriend Anderson that she finds it “peaceful being in a cemetery with the dead. Beautiful, even” (9).