Vivian is an eighty-nine-year-old woman living in New York in 2010. She has just received a letter from a young woman named Angela, informing her that Angela’s mother has just died. Vivian had a relationship with Angela’s father decades earlier, and now Angela wants to know what Vivian meant to her father. In first person narration, Vivian demurs and says she can’t possibly know what she meant to Angela’s father, but she does know what he meant to her. Using that statement as her introduction, Vivian launches into the story of her life starting in 1940 when she was nineteen years old.

Vivian comes from a wealthy clan in upstate New York, but she can’t relate to her family at all. Her mother is an equestrian. Her father is an industrialist, and her older brother is so serious-minded that his schoolmates nicknamed him “the Ambassador.” Vivian also can’t relate to the girls at any of the schools she’s attended over the years. Her most recent humiliation is being booted out of Vassar after her freshman year.

Despairing that she’ll ever amount to anything, her parents ship her off to live with her Aunt Peg in New York.