New York 1980s. Heady excessive times. Alice Burns - a young book editor - is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life. The observations resonate perhaps because she has just watched her own family implode. As she reads she wonders: When did the sadness start? Is the unhappiness a choice? Thus begins a great American epic which follows Alice as she navigates high school bullying first love and sexism at college a spell in 1970's Ireland and a tragedy that sends her stateside. But it is also the tale of her endlessly complex parents and brothers; how their destinies are written by the lies they tell themselves and others.