John Greenburn used to be somebody. Now, he's just a middle-aged guy, sitting behind his computer screen, waiting for his life to come to a screeching halt. Cognitive-Pharma, a Florida-based pharmaceutical company with deep pockets and a secret to hide, has caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. The allegation? Medicare fraud. No one is more on the hook than John, who, as the Chief Ethics Officer at Cognitive-Pharma, has been the canary in the coal mine for the last 12 months. Not that his CEO cares much.
The CEO, a flashy, profit-driven type, certainly doesn't care that John's own mother, Francis, is in desperate need of Cognitive-Pharma's top-selling drug to slow her memory loss. Haunted by what he knows of the fraud allegations - and the investigation's impact on the thousands of patients who depend on the medication - John draws closer to the memories he has of his own mother, Francis, and the ways she pushed him to be somebody. And, not just somebody, but the greatest youth tennis player upstate South Carolina had ever known. With Francis' memory deteriorating, John's time to understand both himself and his mother, a product of the rough mill town that shaped her, is slipping away.
Life Close to the Bone moves from present day Florida and back in time to John's successful tenure on the youth tennis circuit and the textile mill in upstate South Carolina that, through Francis, shaped John's adolescence. It depicts a matriarchal family's relentless striving to overcome their "linthead" heritage and explores what it means to live for yourself and, ultimately, to forgive parents shaped by their own generational hardship.