Wendy's life has been anything but typical. Her father raped her on her sixth birthday, and yet she still lives in the same apartment in Manhattan with him, although he's become such an emotionless figure that she's hardly forced to communicate with him anyway. In fact, she's hardly as concerned with him as her mother, Stella. Dense, materialistic, and needy, Stella is more interested in living vicariously through her daughter than actually raising her. And Wendy knows it. After a particularly icy argument on her seventeenth birthday, Wendy bolts. She's not coming back. The Golden Handle follows Wendy along through a week of sheer hell as she tries to find a sense of genuine happiness that she's lacked for eleven years, and Stella's desperate attempt to reconnect with her only daughter. But after a week laden with racism, murder, an apartment fire, kidnapping, and prostitution, will Wendy really be able to say it was worth it? Will Stella find a way to cope with her own rotten childhood and give her daughter the love she deserves? Does she even deserve a second chance?
