Golub presents the book as a thought experiment on the theme of uncertainty, taking as its premise G. E. Moore's notion of mutually incompatible statements in relation to life being held together by a shifting first-person subject that hypothesizes narrative as a single subject through-line. Wittgenstein's idea of "family resemblance" is recalled as a genre rather than biological or genealogical classification. Golub undoes history and memory for the purpose of discovering the self via a reconstructed language game of family resemblance in which a single self metastasizes from a family cell (or cells), drawing on events from his own and other real and fictional characters' lives.