The Absence

Mexican writer Lavinia Melín, 65 and stalled by tinnitus and a vanished muse, holes up in Saratoga Springs hoping the racetrack’s ritual will jump-start a new novel. Instead, three ghosts of American letters—Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty—start boarding her commuter trains, inviting her to re-live the journeys that forged their art. Their spectral company forces Lavinia to confront her own unwritten pages, the son she left behind on countless book tours and the ruthless clock of literary fame. The Absence melds road diary, autofiction and a mischievous dialogue with literary history, charting one woman’s last gamble to turn silence into story.