Moore is the memoir’s protagonist and narrator. Her nickname is “Tutu” (which her grandmother, Ol’ Ma, sometimes calls her) or “Tutu-geh” (as her father, Gus, sometimes calls her). By the time her family feels the impact of the First Liberian Civil War, she’s five years old, and the book begins on her fifth birthday. Born in Liberia, Moore is later raised in the US, where her family takes refuge during her home country’s period of turmoil. After spending a short period in Stratford, Connecticut, the family moves to Spring, Texas, where Moore lives from age 8 to age 17. Moore depicts herself as a curious and imaginative child. Her reverence for storytelling—and her ability to tell herself stories to explain circumstances that she cannot yet fathom—is one of the book’s key themes.

Moore has two sisters, Wi and K, as well as younger brothers. She is her parents’ second child. Both of her parents are educators who returned to Liberia during her adulthood to live and work at a Liberian university. Moore, during the time in which she writes the novel, is a freelance writer, living and working from her apartment in Brooklyn, New York.