James Ivory's adaptation of Peter Cameron's The City of Your Final Destination tells the story of a grad student (Omar Metwally) hired to write a deceased author's biography. The young man soon discovers that the writer's suicide has left his family, mistress, and partner feuding as they also struggle to make sense of their past decades with the author. The plot begins when a graduate student approaches the writer's offspring about access to their father's papers so that a biography about the man can be written.