These essays explore the challenges Jeffe Kennedy has faced as a woman, a Westerner, a father-less daughter, a stepmother, a biologist, and a girl with hair of no specific colour. From the book's opening in a cornfield, where Kennedy is searching for the twenty-five-year-old site of the plane crash that killed her father, she seems to be in constant motion. She is the feminist adolescent, ashamed to win a prize in home economics who learns to take joy in her pastry skills. She is the scientist struggling with mortality, the liberal learning to shoot a gun.