In the spring of 2020, Lara is with her husband Joe and their twenty-something daughters, Maisie, Emily, and Nell, at their farm in northern Michigan during the pandemic. Lara tells of her early-twenties relationship with famous actor Peter Duke while the two of them working at a summer stock theater company, Tom Lake.
Lara talks about her college experience with the Thornton Wilder play Our Town, her getting a staring movie role, filmed before she went to Tom Lake. She and Duke started a relationship, and Patchett writes about them, his brother Sebastian, and Lara's understudy Pallace. Also, recounted is how they all spent time at a farm (which Duke immediately and forever loved) with Lara's eventual husband Joe, and the Achilles injury that Lara suffered, changing the course of all their lives.
Along with this, Patchett writes of the relationship between Lara and her daughters, including what they expect from their mother and what actually occurred in her life. There's a lot about how our lives not what our children think they were. The girls wanted more to the story, but it's what led to them being together. Patchett writes characters really well and provides a nice story about people and their lives.
