Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders...is this it? As she begins to push back against the structures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life.

Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.