Unlike the real-life Frances Bean Cobain, Calliope is a presumed eyewitness to her father's death, an event that traumatizes her into not speaking for several years.
When she does regain her voice, it is as a poet, and ultimately as the book's co-narrator (she shares the task with a music journalist who, in a post-modernist trope, bears the same name as the author).
The novel is written as a literary pastiche of various forms of media, incorporating purported magazine interviews, academic articles, scripts from unaired television shows and even transcripts from psychoanalysis sessions.
In the words of critic Kel Munger, this inventiveness is one of the book's key strengths: "Altschul skewers everything from the contemporary graduate poetry workshop (which he’s obviously seen from the inside) to the way that the media (frantically) and academia (disingenuously) jump on the fame bandwagon.
In between, there are delicious parodies of magnificent poems, including some by Sylvia Plath, Sexton, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Charles Baudelaire, Frederico García Lorca (sic) … While it doesn’t take a graduate degree in English to follow, recognizing the allusions no doubt adds to the fun.