Part 1 is told from unnamed female narrator’s point of view. Realizing she is near the end of her marriage, the narrator reflects on her family’s “origin story,” contemplating what brought them together and gradually drove them apart. She recalls the early days of her relationship with her husband when they were both assigned to work on a soundscape of New York City—a recorded compilation of atmospheric noises and languages spoken throughout the city—for the Center for Urban Sciences and Progress. They were a well-matched team for the project, so coming together as a couple felt natural. They moved into the same New York City apartment with their children, she bringing a daughter from a previous marriage, he bringing a son from a previous marriage. From the beginning of their marriage, however, their relationship seemed to get tangled up in the social structures and estranging language surrounding legal relationships: “biological mother,” “stepmother,” “joint taxes.”

The narrator reflects on the strange process of telling (and retelling) her children the story of how they became a family; she would “rewind the tape in our minds and play it again from the beginning” (8). The more she retells the story, the less certain she seems to feel about its cohesiveness.