Summary

The concluding chapter of this book is an essay titled "A Prognosis" and is in many ways the most intimate of the book. It begins in 2015 when she flies home for the Miami Book Fair to promote her first novel. This meant her parents would be in the crowd for her reading: a terrifying and also exciting prospect. Her father is particularly nervous, and he cannot not keep his food down, knowing a fictionalized version of himself featured heavily in the book. He was determined never to read it. This then leads her to a commentary on how for everyone in her immediate family, including herself, stress manifests itself in the digestive tract. For her, this means that she tends to vomit due to stress. She charts this tendency back to a formative night in high school on a bad date.

Her father...