Summary

In Chapter 1, the narrator, Gifty, recalls spending three months in Ghana with her aunt while her mother experienced a mental health crisis back in America. She was 11 years old. Her aunt pointed out “a crazy person” (3) in the market, and Gifty felt embarrassed. She knew something was mentally wrong with her mother, but she was unable to reconcile that knowledge with the “crazy” man before her.

In Chapter 2, Gifty, at 28, was working in her lab at Stanford University when she got a call from her mother's pastor back in Huntsville, Alabama. He told her that her mother was unwell again. She told Pastor John to send her mother to California. She picked her mother up at the airport and brought her back to her apartment. Her mother went directly to bed, never speaking.

In Chapter 3, Gifty went to work, where she hid tears...