The Gin Closet

In the beginning there was Tilly: fabulous and free, outrageous and untamable, vulnerable and terrified. As a young woman, she flees home for the hollow neon underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. Decades later, after eventually drinking herself to the brink of death, her niece shows up on the doorstep of her dusty trailer. Stella has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City. When her dying grandmother confesses the truth about Tilly, her runaway daughter, Stella decides to give up the vast and penetrating loneliness of the city to find this lost woman the family had never mentioned. The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between Tilly and Stella as they move to San Francisco to make a home with Abe, Tilly's overworked and elusive son, forming a fragile triangle that eventually breaks under its own weight. With Leslie Jamison's uncanny ear for dialogue and witty, unflinching candor about sex, love and power, The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.