A lyrical journey through grief, identity, and the heartbreak of a daughter and a father who both deserved better.

Pearce Goode sits at a diner counter, wearing his dead daughter's sunglasses, writing letters she will never read. The journey to comprehend his story — and hers — begins.

His childhood home is tense with a cold silence that is like wallpaper, its tension only to be broken by punches. Coming of age, he drifts backward, forward and sideways into adulthood, until his daughter Jessica arrives and his world lands on solid ground. But a hidden battle emerges: her struggle to escape abuse and to survive with a mind that must fracture just to stay alive.

Pearce tries to keep her moving, walking every step with her. He crosses oceans with her, shares swings with her in pretend flight, and seeks to quiet her fears. He finds the doctor who helps him understand her, a doctor who uses the word “curable” and knows the difference between psychology and psychobabble. At last, there is hope. But when the phone rings on a Saturday afternoon, all is shattered and Pearce crashes back into silence.

After Jessica becomes AJ, he counts the days and years from her death the way he once counted the seconds, minutes and hours of childhood punishment. From AJ Day One and onward, he seals each evening letter with a kiss. But he cannot avoid the question with no answer: How does one’s love survive when the one it was meant for does not?

With Cormac McCarthy’s unflinching eye, Ben Shattuck’s instinctive empathy and Sapphire’s brutal honesty, Richard Friday Greene’s Jessica is a lyrical and devastating work of grief fiction written for everyone who finds him or herself in life’s wreckage and asks what they could have done differently. It will breach your heart — then revive you with the hope and promise of surviving the incomprehensible.