“You’re susceptible first to idolatry,” Nell writes, “then to study, to apprenticeship, and finally to a kind of patient love that makes fun of itself and believes in itself without limit.” Also jousting for a position within Joan’s court are: Tom, Nell’s unicorn-obsessed ex her best friend, Mishti, and Mishti’s boyfriend, Carlo and Joan’s husband, Barry, who has imprisoned her in his tower on Manhattan’s upscale Riverside Drive. Ten years Nell’s senior, Joan has an austere elegance that’s enough to make an awkward, unsophisticated loner from Kansas fall dangerously in love - the performative, medieval variety that sustains itself precisely because it’s unrequited. Waiting to begin her self-guided study into botanical toxins, Nell begins writing a personal account of her abject situation, her romantic and toxic obsessions, addressed as an invocation to their true source: Joan. Joan Kallas, Nell steals the lab’s poisonous seeds and plants them in her own apartment in outer Red Hook, Brooklyn. Rootless, looking to bloom and so earn the admiration of her former adviser Prof.
Her alma mater, Columbia, banished all six members of her lab group after their work on the detoxification of poisonous plants proved fatal.
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