West Coast-based Aunt K (the author) writes to niece DeeDee, ostensibly to bring her up to speed on family history and share anecdotes about their North Carolina relatives, past and present. The letters soon evolve into broader discussions of community, loss, love, ambition, leaving the South (in body, if not mind) and what it means to negotiate life as a female. Integral to the correspondence are books and writers (from Burroughs to Woolf), landscapes and cityscapes in North Carolina, California, New Mexico, New York, East Sussex and elsewhere. A persistent theme: the inter-weavings of person and place. It is also, in the sum of its parts, deeply concerned with the question of which elements (genetic and circumstantial) conspire to make us who we are.
