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Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless,
college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young
people in New York. She's accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared
studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen's
adoptive brother is dead.
According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her
brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows
that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows
that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his
death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she
searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would
choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother's few
friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also
discover what it truly means to be alive.
A bleakly comic tour de force that's by turns poignant, uproariously
funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of
Bernhard, Beckett and Bowles?and it announces the singular voice of
Patrick Cottrell