A mother dead of cancer. An effigy of Daddy in the front seat of the Olds. "True Confessions" hurled across the living room. A motorcade of hearses lined up across the way. The doctor not talking. The exits all hidden. Jane can remember the angels on St. Mark's Place. The poets and lovers and unwed mothers. Trapeze artists, too. She had run away from home and taken the 4 train from the Bronx all the way to Venice and back. Her son would have had a phrase for it: "the heavenly express." Jane Cantore, a onetime teenage runaway to New York's East Village, is now dying of ovarian cancer. In a lifetime framed by crises, she exerts all the willpower she can muster, against all odds, to live life fully, love meaningfully and leave a lasting mark on the world. She, her husband, an omniscient narrator and a mysterious witness all tell her story.