When a New York City reality show producer, and mother of three, is blacklisted from the entertainment industry and then brutally attacked, a spiraling addiction and a haunting accident from her past resurface old wounds and unravel her life.
Grace O'Doyle, the complicated anti-heroine of The Hole in the Rabbit, loses control after a series of personal and professional snafus have her reckoning with life-long recreational drug use. In the midst of imploding in on her home and career, Grace's cloudy relapse sends her back in time to reconcile with the genesis of her drug abuse and to revisit the consequences of growing up in a culture of firearms.
Motherhood takes a back seat on Grace's foray into the depths of her addiction, raising questions on how parenthood can collapse at the whim of unresolved demons, and revealing ways in which one might succumb to a life of wreckage over the love of children. Grace's downfall presents a complex comparison of failures in motherhood versus that of fatherhood, examining the "cultural disapproval" toward a willing rejection of motherhood in relation to the ongoing, "culturally accepted" absences in fatherhood.
Debilitating mishaps force Grace into rehab, where she has to face what is driving the ruin of her mental and physical health. During her time in treatment, an unresolved secret from her violent (silent and accepted and thus invisible and normalized) childhood erupts, implicating herself and her high-school sweetheart (now husband), Scott. At the precipice of revealing her truth, resolving her troubles, bringing Scott down with her, Grace is further silenced and ensnared by her past when Scott shows up at rehab and takes her home.
In the end, despite the lingering trap of her past, Grace finds only a moment of reprieve-a temporary release from the vicious cycle of addiction-because violence, as it whispers loudly, is inherited.
The Hole in the Rabbit suspends you in mid-air, upending your preconceived notions of drugs, guns and guilt, opening the door to complex, timely topics-addiction, therapies and gun ownership-driving home the culturally-driven and inherently-bequeathed nature of the most prevalent issues plaguing American society.
