Joanna Jacobs is a Jewish lesbian novelist. Her mother just died; the FBI has ordered her to get a psychiatric evaluation after an unfortunate telephone call; the only woman she's ever loved is shacking up with her best friend; her Brooklyn tenement has been "taken over" by undocumented Chinese immigrants; a crew of juvenile delinquents has invaded her apartment through a hole in the closet ceiling—and it's been raining for weeks. Joanna is trying to preserve her sanity by toiling away on a book about growing up in a world so different from the present one that it's hard to imagine that it ever existed at all. But what links her past to her present are her two best girlfriends. One remains her steadfast loyal friend. But she she's even more angry at the other one now than she was when they first met, in the days of skate keys and hula hoops and a future that seemed to stretch into the glorious distance.