Sitting at the bedside of his mother as she is dying from leukemia in a hospital in northern Mexico, Julián is immersed in memories of his unstable boyhood and youth. Guadalupe was a prostitute, and Julián spent his childhood with half brothers and sisters each from a different father, moving from city to city and from one tough neighborhood to the next. As he wanders the hospital, Julián tells fevered stories of his life as a writer, from a trip with his pregnant wife to a poetry festival in Berlin to a drug-fueled and possibly completely imagined trip to another festival in Cuba.