After losing her mother on the day of her high school graduation, Dillon Bloom enters college and discovers that her calling is to become a writer. When she finds out that the father she thought had died in her infancy may be a very much alive and famous, but reclusive, novelist she is determined to find him and discover whether he is, in fact, her father. Martin Bloom, her father, is killing himself with alcohol and, after being fired from teaching positions at Harvard and Stanford, he is living a degenerate life on a boat in Saigon, Vietnam, hoping to regain his ability to write. Dillon's search for her father, a quest which takes her from Oregon to Massachusetts to California and finally to Vietnam, is an odyssey of alternating hope and despair in which two anti-social people, father and daughter, struggle with their identities and the meaning of the other in each of their lives.