Empty Set

A Venn diagram for love, Bicecci’s narrator traces and reconstructs her relationships using geometry, ice cores, and tree rings.

How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences? Can tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop-skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator’s attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and br...