Luke Daemon and Gerard Dumaine are young men in the insurance business. They have also both married Shirley, Luke as a youth and Gerard coming soon to take his place. Gerard and Shirley go on to a life of global success--he in a multi-national company, she in comparative literature. They travel from one capital to the next. He is finally a CEO, working in the World Trade Center. She teaches at Columbia. Luke marries Debbie and they work in a Chicago insurance office. He is alcoholic and almost dies. He recovers and they go to a small Kentucky city. There he begins a long road from failure to...

At thirty Cass ends a decade of travel edged with terrorism and aimless sex that is becoming mechanical and even virtual. Then she finds Martin Willey, also stuck in place and disappointed in his own passionate life. Together they regain a sense of sensual purity and innocence in their swinging Westchester suburb. But their marriage too finally leads to sexual disappointment.

Now alone, Cass is washed-up in a Manhattan apartment. Then she finds a man with a weird lifestyle and a crazy mission involving poetry, who asks her to share it with him. She veers between her life as a travel writer...

This is a memoir of a woman who lived on the margin of her time and place. The time is the 1950's and '60's; the place, the provinces and cities of America--and around Europe. The woman studies and teaches in colleges and wanders single and alone throughout her twenties through the midwest and Europe. Her story raises questions that her time and place don't answer easily. How to live? Career or husband or are both possible? Children, the ticking biological clock? How to deal with love and sex? How to resist the prevailing pressure of the times to conform: marry, get the tract house in the...