Marjorie's husband, Byron Coffin, had misled her for so long, that she learned to lean away from life to keep from falling over, like a woman walking a large dog."  So begins the disarming and funny story of Marjorie Leblanc--"the woman who was not all there."  After Byron abandons her in 1963, Marjorie works as a nurse to support herself and her four young children.  With no eligible husband on the horizon, she settles for sipping gin and gossiping with her lady friends like Rita, the rough-talking laundromat owner, or dealing with daughter Karen, a budding Peeping Tom.  The problem is that Marjorie can't keep things from changing --  her friends scatter and her children grow up and move away.    It's only when a near-fatal illness strikes that Marjorie realizes how to get on with her life, this time, on her own terms."

          Marjorie's husband, Bryon Coffin, had misled her for so long that she learned to lean away from life to keep from falling over, like a woman walking a large dog.  The week after Marjorie and her husband separated permanently, she quit her job as a nurse's aide and withdrew from the evening nursing classes she had been attending sporadically for years.  All month, she sat on the living room couch from morning until night, playing cards with her four small children, reading "Humor in Uniform" in the May, 1963 Reader's Digest, and watching monster movies on afternoon television.

        Marjorie was amazed by the variety of monsters that had developed over the years of her marriage when she had been working and unable to watch much television.  There was the Wolfman, whose victims became wolfmen, and Dracula, who turned the ladies he bit into female replicas of himself, pale women with desperate-looking eyes and widow's peaks.  There was the Phantom of the Opera, who carried girls into underground sewers, and the old wall lamp in Marjorie's living room had the same smooth, glistening surface as the phantom's face.  There were also the monsters who were more modern and appeared in color on late-night television.  These arose from scientists toying with human genes, from men overexposed to radioactivity or archaeologists thawing in human creatures from ice beds in the Artic.  The more modern monsters could not be stopped by silver bullets or ordinary acts like falling from cathedral tops.  They were shapeless forms that grew from the size of molehills into mountains by devouring everything in their path, beginning with the stick that prodded them and the hand that held the stick and then the whole man attached to the hand; or they were men who should have died but could not, their natural deaths having been interfered with by the unnaturally curious.