“Here we go, the same story heard over and over again, but in reverse. The girl goes from Hollywood to a small town.” Margot is young, almost famous, and lonely, a daughter of celebrity parents and grandparents who has been emotionally neglected. Her rock star father, Steve, is only attentive to her in public. Her mother, Rose, is “a big withholder”: she cares for Margot but she doesn’t know how to be with her. More often than not, Rose leaves Margot with her own mother, Josephine, a former dancer who pulls the family strings. As a girl, Margot cuts and electrocutes herself – craving attention, she hardly notices the fact that she experiences no physical pain.
Stephanie LaCava’s second novel opens as Margot is abandoned by a controlling boyfriend and quits New York for rural Montana. “Everyone wants to go to the big city. Why never the reverse?” Of course, escaping to the country is not quite as renegade as Margot seems to believe. She’s folded in on herself in a shrunken world, lost in that strange combination of hypersensitivity and callousness that miserable feelings can bring on. She replaces an overturned stone gently, to avoid harming the bugs beneath. But she wipes her bleeding nose on the bathroom mirror; the cleaner will remove the blood. She pays extraordinary attention to clothing and decor: a choker’s “tiny flickering gold bars”, a butter-coloured leather cushion. “I tried to think of something to take my mind off myself.”
