Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the source text’s depictions of addiction and attempted suicide.

The author notes that she’s a writer and her job is to tell stories. When she thinks about where to begin her own family’s history, she realizes that it doesn’t matter. Human stories are complex, interconnected, and always in various stages of becoming. They have, she reflects, no real endings or beginnings. She realizes that she can begin her own story anywhere.

Nine-year-old François writes to his father in Greece to tell him the family’s news. Until recently, they were all living in Salonica, where his father is the naval attaché at the French embassy, but as the Nazis began to advance across Europe, his father packed them all off to Algeria to stay with relatives. His parents have long spoken of the beauty of the city of Algiers and how important it is to their family, but when they arrive, François finds it hot and crowded. None of their extended family members seem to want to house them, and life is difficult. They’re staying with Tata Baudry, an 85-year-old relative whose home is dirty and unpleasant compared to their house in Salonica and their previous house in Beirut.