Susan

Susan is a 43-year-old English Adjunct professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Over the course of the novel, Susan abandons her former writing project to begin work on her memoir. Through her writing, Susan begins excavating long buried memories from her childhood. Having felt distanced from her husband Bobby ever since she told him the truth of her mother Linda's murder and father Daniel's imprisonment, Susan goes to stay with her grandmother Lois. Susan's stay with Lois forces her to confront her bitterness for her father and her struggles with intimacy.

As Susan writes more and more of her memoir, she begins to understand the depth of her hurt, and the inescapable hold her father's crime continues to have on her psyche. Though she has a nominally stable and peaceful marriage with Bobby, Susan disrupts their relationship, afraid of her incapability to love. When she divulges...