Comes with Furniture and People tells the story of a daughter desperate to reach a mother trapped in depression. What’s more, the daughter intuits the mother has an incurable disease, one the mother hides even from herself, as she spends her days reading Greek dramas and studying the etymologies of words. Four years after the mother dies of leukemia, The Washington Post runs a front-page story of her house cordoned off because it was a bomb testing site during World War One. And here the daughter’s gnawing suspicion is confirmed. The memoir also chronicles that daughter’s experience—in her thirties—with stage three breast cancer, mastectomy and single motherhood. Set in Washington, D.C., Comes with Furniture and People describes sleepovers with Amy Carter, waiting for Gorbachev to drive by in a motorcade, and the glorious peal of The National Cathedral bells floating over her neighborhood.