Morocco

In this intricate tale, a woman untangles her enduring bond with an heiress who she is still trying to understand…

Chicago, the turn of the 21st century. Our narrator—always there and never entirely present—recounts her decades-long relationship with the heiress, Katherine Stern. Through the years since boarding school, she has seen Katherine as a daughter who wants for nothing but respect from her psychotherapist father, as a woman with a kind, but fortune-hunting fiancée, and as a mystery even more confounding than the gothic horror stories she evaluates from the slush pile at her job. Sometimes, despite their estrangement, she has even seen Katherine as a friend.

Inspired by the classic story Washington Square by Henry James, Norah Labiner reimagines the prolific tale. Moving through wintery Michigan avenue to the creeping mansions of the rich to the world of melodrama, ghosts, and girls. Morocco confronts the ambiguity of memory, the horrors of history, and what it means, or does not mean, to read a book and tell a story.