“The Story She Left Behind” is filled with characters who have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions and life events. It’s about women and creativity and living a life differently from those around us, and being ostracized for those choices. Patti Callahan Henry presents loss in many of its varieties: abandonment, death, divorce. In Henry’s capable hands, the story of a daughter searching for her mother is beautiful, made more lovely by the choice of two idyllic settings. The main character Clara is raised in South Carolina on the coast near Savannah. Her early days are spent fishing, searching for oysters, playing imaginary games with her creative, clever, doting mother. It’s a perfect childhood until the night in 1927 when her mother disappears.