A true story of two women speaking from self-imposed exile. Separated by seven centuries and an ocean, their stories intersect when Marie Laure makes a solo pilgrimage. She wants to understand why Julian of Norwich lived from age fifty in a cell, an anchorage, attached to a church during the Black Death plague. Her own so-called anchorage is a river porch attached to a Florida townhouse. How had she ended up in quasi-exile? Trying to make sense of it, she writes, just as Julian wrote to understand what had happened in a near-death experience.