When a woman who loves women is not a woman, then who is? Professionally successful, generally well-liked, and recently engaged, Shelby nonetheless resists the traditional role of an obedient wife that her environment tries to impose on her. As she realizes how much her new neighbor Fran means to her, she begins to finally rearrange the pieces of her life. In her most personal novel, Sarah Dreher paints a sensitive, humorous, and at the same time painfully realistic picture of the 1960s, from the time before Stonewall and Gay Pride, when a 'real woman' was not allowed to rebel against societal expectations, let alone fall in love with another woman.