High strung

Merle Winslow left her Ohio hometown more than 10 years ago and hasn't been back. But now she's fed up with her job as an editor for a London porn publisher and with her longtime boyfriend, whose suggestion that they take a trip on a "swinging ferry" (a ferry trip on which couples swap partners, not a boat that sways) was the last straw. She heads back to Ohio to face her past and reconnect with her father, brother, and grandmother, while trying to make sense of the death of her alcoholic mother when Merle was 13, as well as her mother's social ostracization for having been a friend of…