As he sits by his dying mother, a son immerses himself in his memories of his childhood and youth while he investigates the complex relationship with his mother, his own children and his country, Mexico. Sitting at the bedside of his mother as she is dying from leukemia in a hospital in northern Mexico, Julin is immersed in memories of his unstable boyhood and youth. Guadalupe was a prostitute, and Julin spent his childhood with half brothers and sisters each from a different father, moving from city to city and from one tough neighborhood to the next. As he wanders the hospital, Julin tells fevered stories of his life as a writer, from a trip with his pregnant wife to a poetry festival in Berlin to a drug-fueled and possibly completely imagined trip to another festival in Cuba.