Days away from turning eighteen, Lila has resolved to end her life. She is a patient in a psychiatric hospital being treated for anorexia. Lila tells the story of how she ended up on the Four East wing: we flash back to her childhood in the eighties, growing up in a small town as the overweight brown kid of Punjabi immigrant parents: her father, a literary scholar whom she idolizes, and her mother, a housewife. Faerie weaves these passages with Lila's downward spiral into life-threatening illness, her budding sexuality, and her complicated recovery in hospital that comes with a price.