The Good Girl Is Gone

All hell breaks loose in the Bender household the day Mama runs off with that no-good Wayne Hargrove from the filling station. Papa can’t believe she’s gone, Lulu just shrugs it off and Ginny sees Mama everywhere she isn’t. But absence makes the head go cloudy, so Papa begins to see clues of a kidnapping in the farewell note Mama left behind, while Ginny follows “Mama” through a plate-glass window. Is it any wonder Lulu find herself strangely attracted to the exhausted, pill-popping medical intern treating her sister? But all that is merely prologue to the biggest test of Lulu’s life—the day that Mama walks back into it. Alone in a motel room far from home, finally determined to free herself of a bad love match, Lulu is forced to extract the truth from Mama—exactly what did happen that day outside the A&P so many years before? And why, after all this time, can’t Lulu let go of the nagging fear that somehow, some way, it was all her fault? A dark comedy that careens wildly from pathos to hilarity, The Good Girl Is Gone pokes at the bruised heart of the American family to examine the power of memory to torment and heal.