This book is a reflective journey through the disintegration of the "big story." The big story is the one we live inside of, the one that gives us the certainties and continuities of our lives. The disintegration occurred in Sydney in the late 1960s, amid social and personal turmoil, and led to the narrator's flight to the country. He finds a place to settle, gives up books, begins to garden. Gradually he reclaims the centre, and gradually he re-engages with society, although there is tumult in that too. But there is love, there is music, and there are visions of life with spirit and with ethics. The narrator talks his way through, remembering, recounting, rejecting, resolving. There are four parts to the story - Disintegration, Renewing, Onward and Reframing. The book is the fourth book the author has written as part of National Novel Writing Month, where the project is to write a book of at least 50,000 words in one month.