The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife: A Novel

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of death, illness, pregnancy loss, sexual content, sexual harassment, addiction, and child death.

Eighty-two-year-old Fred has just been evicted for failing to pay his rent. He wanders a park where some nursing home residents have been brought for an outing. Fred finds that one of them has died, alone in his wheelchair. As Fred wheels the chair toward the others, he trips, and the body falls out of the chair and rolls down the bank and into the river.

Suddenly, one of the caregivers spots Fred. Assuming that Fred is actually the deceased man (named Bernard), the caregiver rushes him into the wheelchair, which is then loaded into a van.

In the past, two young sisters—Sadie and Hannah—play tag until Sadie’s nose begins bleeding. They find their mother inside, home from work for lunch, and she asks the girls’ father to take Sadie to see a doctor for her frequent nose bleeds.

At the nursing home, a caregiver named Denise is angry about Bernard’s fall. She searches his file to document it and becomes increasingly angry upon discovering that other personnel have misfiled things. She thinks about her daughter’s health problems and worries about what could be wrong.