Molly Russakoff’s unpublished novel, Red Tape, begins with Helen Goldberg and her mother Daisy at the bottom of a gully, her new car nose-first in the soft earth. Played out and checkmated, Helen considers this latest wrinkle in her situation. She looks out over the landscape, lush with new growth, and wonders “what happens to people like me. I know we’re everywhere, but I don’t know how we end up.”

After a perfectly lovely afternoon with her family at her parents’ cottage, Helen kisses her 12 year old daughter, Sweetie, goodnight and settles into bed with her husband, Name. Too many hours later, she awakens alone, rang from a drugged sleep by a frantic phone call. She leaves Sweetie snoring and heads out for the hospital. By the end of the day, her father is dead by medical mixup and her mother is in jail. 

It becomes clear as the hours, then days pass that her husband is gone, vanished; all evidence of their long life together, erased. A fruitless search for him ends months later, when he resurfaces as a mega superstar, a jingler of infinite proportions. The air is saturated with his ads, his voice and image everywhere, spilling through faucets, pictured on a multitude of billboards, projected onto the constant fog that dominates the forecast of this particular near-future scenario. 

Buoyed by imagination and bedeviled by hallucinations (her own and others), Helen makes her way through a growing maze of new construction, flawed technology, quack professionals and eponymous tangles of red tape. The world spins faster and faster as she does her best to carry her eccentric teenage daughter and discombobulated mother to some elusive idea of terra firma.