Born to a fiercely independent nurse who wants a child but no husband, the son of her unconventional conception grows up in the world of a New England boys' school and comes of age as a wrestler and aspiring writer. His mother, meanwhile, writes a memoir that turns her into an unexpected feminist icon, drawing both devotion and violence into their lives. Following him from youth into marriage, fatherhood, and a writing career, the novel traces his attempts to build an ordinary, loving family while the world around him proves chaotic, absurd, and frequently cruel. Lust, accident, and ideology collide in ways that are by turns hilarious and devastating, and the line between his fiction and his life grows thin as stories he invents seem to bleed into reality. Told with dark comedy and sudden tenderness, it is a sprawling portrait of a man trying to protect those he loves in a world he cannot control. Anxiety about children, the pull of desire, the politics of the body, and the consolations and dangers of storytelling all run through a narrative that insists on both the ridiculousness and the seriousness of being alive. The result is a wildly inventive saga about family, art, and the persistence of grief and love.