Summary

Part I begins with Chapter 1, in which narrator Samantha Heather Mackey has just arrived on campus at Warren University, an experimental writing school on the East Coast, for her final year in the fiction MFA program. She attends a welcome back party with her best friend Ava, a drop-out from the nearby art school, and expresses her general disgust with the four other girls in her writing workshop, whom she refers to collectively as the “Bunnies” (3), because this is the pet name each of them having given each other. The Bunnies are wealthy and overly affectionate with one another. Samantha does not have any friends on campus, and she alludes to an awkward former intimacy with her thesis adviser, whom she calls “the Lion” (6). Samantha also has specific nicknames for each of the Bunnies, “Cupcake,” “Creepy Doll,” “Vignette,” and “the Duchess” (7).

In Chapter...