Virginia and Joe Thorndike have been married for twenty-two years, and she wants a new life. She’s in love with Rich Villamano, a surgeon thirteen years her junior, but after flying to Miami to start living with him, he tells her he has changed his mind and they must go their own ways. In an instant their four-year affair is over. She takes off in his car, headed north with no luggage, no hope, no destination. She buys a bottle of gin and drinks it straight. Afraid that she’ll kill herself or someone else on the road, she abandons the car in Georgia, flies to New York and takes an airport hotel room. She has no home and nowhere to go.

Her older son Jamie, a closeted gay student at Dartmouth, has walked off into a White Mountain snowstorm. It’s Ginny who discovers that after faking his suicide, he has holed up in a cabin owned by Miles, the gay art teacher at his former boarding school. The deceptive suicide, suggested by Miles, has helped save his life.

Once reunited, mother and son wind up in a borrowed house in Sag Harbor on Long Island. Ginny is an anesthesiologist but in no shape to practice. Her younger son Rob joins her for the summer, as Jamie and his older lover move to Provincetown. Rob, at sixteen, must deal with a shattered and sometimes drunken mother.

She sobers up and falls apart, many times. She works for several clinics, she joins the Peace Corps and spends two years as a doctor in Chile. But back in the States, it’s discovered that she has been filling her own sedative prescriptions, and her clinic fires her. To hide this from her sons, she signs up for a yoga trip to India. On her flight home, after too many pills, she passes out and wakes up in a New York hospital. Though sober when released, she soon starts drinking again, and takes more pills than ever. She wants only to be unconscious, and one cold November night she falls asleep for the last time.