From Texas Monthly journalist John Davidson comes a moving memoir about a life lost to a narrative that may or not be his own.

The story begins in Mexico City in 1973, the summer of the Watergate Hearings. Davidson encounters a nineteen-year-old girl, a whirlwind of nervous energy, who’s running away from her Texas family. John has decided that writing fiction is his vocation and is working on a short story, all the while trying to come to terms with being bisexual at a time when so many people, especially gays, don’t believe in that possibility.

When John tells Maggie about his work, she insists that he write the saga of her rich, aristocratic family…and their history begins.

Two years later, Maggie shows up at the Texas ranch where John has been secluded, teaching himself to write. And their journey together picks up where they left off.

By day, John turns out stories he sends to The New Yorker. By night, sitting in a broken Barcalounger, reading In Search of Lost Time, he falls under the spell of Proust’s voice. Alone in a shack, miles from the nearest paved road and without a telephone, his only companion is a wren that’s built its nest in the living room.

But Maggie, who has been dividing her time between Austin and Bogota, where she’s engaged to be married, still insists that John write THE FAMILY SAGA. When he reminds her that he doesn’t know what that is, she says he must meet her family. Then he will know.

Falling is a story of love: conditional love of family; love between men and women; love between men and men; love between John and Maggie; and the crippling power of love unresolved.