In this award-winning book, Drusilla Modjeska sets out to collect the evidence of her mother's life. But when the facts refuse to give up their secrets, she follows the thread of history and memory into imagination. There she teases out the story of Poppy, who married at twenty and sang to her children, until suddenly one day in 1959, she was taken away to a sanatorium. What had gone wrong in a family that everyone described as happy? What pulled Poppy through the years of shock treatment and despair? These are some of the questions the daughter must ask before she can make peace with her own past.