Corte Madera is where David Sheff’s private panic becomes visible to others and where, later, he tries to contain a renewed crisis through writing. The town’s church meeting room and public library frame two forms of endurance: accepting help in a room full of strangers and attempting to keep writing as alarming news approaches.

A Church Room and a Shared Crisis

At an Al-Anon meeting in a church room in Corte Madera, David is shaking and unable to restrain himself. When his turn comes, he rushes through a reconstruction of the previous couple of weeks, overwhelmed by tears and panic. As he speaks, he feels estranged from his own account, as though someone else were talking and the events could not be his life.

Drained, David tells the group that he does not know how anyone in the room survives this. He cries, and many of the other people there cry too. Afterward, while he helps fold and stack the metal chairs, a woman he has never met hugs him. David weeps in her arms; she tells him, “Keep coming back.” The meeting offers no resolution to Nic’s crisis, but it turns solitary distress into something shared and met with human contact.

The Library and the Return of Uncertainty

At the Corte Madera library, David works beside a stack of books, writing repeatedly in an effort to contain events that are once again spiraling out of control. The setting is quieter than the church meeting, but the calm is fragile: because he is in the library, he has put his phone on vibrate.

The phone begins shaking and rattling on the table. David picks it up to avoid disturbing anyone and sees that the incoming call is from Nic’s girlfriend’s phone. The scene ends at the moment of recognition, with the phone’s sickly green letters interrupting his attempt to write. Corte Madera thus returns as a place where David tries to manage what he cannot control—first by speaking in a support group, then by writing, only to be pulled back toward the unfolding crisis.