For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families by the tail end of the 20th century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. As she grows older, she slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm --- from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive.

Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for 25 years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. Maintaining this diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time.