Real Life

Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms. He is four years
into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that’s a world away from his
childhood in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace didn’t go back for the funeral,
and he hasn’t told his friends – Miller, Yngve, Cole and Emma. For reasons of self-preservation, he
has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. But, over the course
of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, the destruction of his work and a series of intense
confrontations force Wallace to grapple with both the trauma of the past, and the question of the future.
Deftly zooming in and out of focus, Real Life is a deeply affecting story about the emotional cost of reckoning with
desire, and overcoming pain.