In this oddly funny, at times unnerving and always unflinching novel, the remorseless glare of the twenty-four-hour news cycle is turned onto a thirty-five-year-old North Carolinian by the name of Jerry Chiffon. Jerry, dressed to kill in a Nancy Reagan-red ladies' suit, wearing a wig and carrying a fake-Chanel purse, has just tried to assassinate a right-wing U.S. senator.Fueling the rumors surrounding Jerry's little lapse of decorum are a chorus of narrators - ladies of his hometown, Branch Creek, who had befriended Jerry and tutored him in the domestic arts when he was left motherless at seven and at the mercy of a hopeless father. Assorted relatives and acquaintances, not to mention gawkers and busybodies, put their two cents in to relate - what? The truth of how a kind, sensitive, seemingly apolitical friend and neighbor was compelled to attempt this mad act? Or a story altered by each person's prejudice for or against Jerry? Finally, in the book's most galvanizing moment, we hear from Jerry himself. Confined in a miserable prison cell, he touches on everything from that hard, motherless start of his on a tenant farm to the far-off, glamorous adventures he once experienced among the gilded and gawdy of Manhattan. Who he really is turns out to be more of a surprise than anything else he has done.The questions at the heart of Anderson Ferrell's novel are reverberating ones: how do we tell a story when the truth of it is too big for the facts that support it, and above all, how - not why - do we love what we love? Read Less