If you cannot see it, cannot hear, if it is not said, it doesn't exist. This is how you live a life. Katey allows herself the emotional distance to be cruel to him, leaving in the middle of the night, not telling him. This is her inheritance. This novel is a homecoming, an adult rinsing of childhood hurts.
Death creates an actual absence, something to mourn and love and get to the other side of.
Katey speaks this story of hurt, and so begins to undo her difficult history. That is, he's stretched it out so far and wide as to shatter the genre's stoic boundaries. Powell's fourth novel is a wild daydream that morphs into an epic love story. It starts with Mrs. Hollingsworth, a woman haunted by war and lost love. When she sits down to write a shopping list, she digresses into an afternoon of writing that takes us through her imagination.