Summary

Chapter 1 introduces the novel’s protagonist, Lucy, who lives and studies in Phoenix, Arizona. She procrastinates on completing her classics and literature Ph.D. thesis, which argues that one should read the missing parts of Sappho’s work as intentional, rather than projecting one’s own meanings for the blanks based on what one knows about her life. She reflects on her own complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, and nothingness, and knows that while her thesis is “total bullshit,” she does not want to get a “real” job, so she hopes that by the end of the summer, she will somehow have something to hand in, because the department will be cutting off her funding after 9 years (2, 4). At this point, she has been staying at her sister’s house in Venice Beach in Los Angeles for a week, housesitting and watching her dog Dominic...