True story: so engrossing is Leigh Stein’s “The Fallback Plan,” an epic story of post-college depression and suburban hell, that I didn’t realize the narrative itself wasn’t a “true story” until 50 pages in — when my reptilian brain finally realized that Esther, the novel’s acerbic protagonist, and Leigh were not the same person.

"The Fallback Plan"

Whereas Stein had reached literary success within the pages of The New Yorker by age 22, Esther Konch finds herself at the same age moving back in with her parents, unable to find a job with her Northwestern theater degree and forced, as a result, to spend her days moping about the house, pondering ethical dilemmas and hanging out with questionable “friends” from her high school days.

Stein’s depictions of this twilight period in Esther’s stalled journey toward adulthood are both scintillating and scary. Days full of millennial-generation languor have rarely been described so beautifully, but these same scenes of park-side despair are also realistic — Esther squishing a college apartment full of belongings back into her old bedroom-turned-home-office; Esther struggling to fill a long, empty day with meaningless activities an household chores — that they will strike fear into the heart of any senior soon to graduate and enter the real world.

But then, in Esther’s life and the novel, an unexpected turn: She takes a job as a nanny for neighborhood child May. As Esther becomes more and more a part of May’s life, she’s increasingly dismayed by the cracks apparent in the girl’s perfect family exterior. As May’s parents, Nate and Amy, each become increasingly obsessed with Esther and the long-lost college youth she represents to them, Esther has to reevaluate her life priorities, at the expense of her relationships with those around her.

Another true story, to go atop the almost-true one Stein recreates: prose like hers makes me angry. Angry because it forces me to understand that my own writing will never ring so true. “The Fallback Plan” imbues all aspiring writers with the thought — both wonderful, because the book is; and saddening, because the book is — that should you ever find yourself in a situation similar to Esther’s, some of us couldn’t write our way out.