"While writing her first book, twenty-five-year-old Pearl Christomo is haunted by ghosts, images of the past, scenes from movies, and lines from tragedies. She confronts the roles and emptiness that previous writers have ascribed to women and discovers that the plots, details, and characters of her fiction begin to mirror her own story."--BOOK JACKET.

"Growing up with an elusive ghost-like father and raised in suburban Michigan by a mother always searching for something just beyond her reach, Pearl chooses to exile herself to a private school in the isolated Upper Peninsula. Once there, Pearl begins her novel, discovering that the characters - Hugh Denmark, a reclusive writer; Aaron and Rose, the not-so-perfect couple; Theresa, an actress; Mary Clare and Butternut, little sisters spying on the world - all come to resemble the players in her own life.

Eventually the boundaries between the two narratives tangle and the limits of fiction, dream, and memory are lost."--BOOK JACKET.