How does a young woman's life unfold when she walks in on her husband not once, but twice, in bed with other women? While Emma Aspen White wants to have a meaningful life and career, she has long known that her collegiate aspiration is a Mrs. Degree. She believes that she has achieved that with her first love, Dr. Marc White. However, when that marriage ends, Emma's journey over the next forty-some years, provides plenty of drama.
Born in 1955 in Des Moines, Iowa, Emma begins her story at age thirteen when she decides to spend her freshman year of high school at Rosedale, a boarding school in Massachusetts. She concludes her narrative in June 2021 when, at almost sixty-six years old, she is contemplating her life and her competency as a mother, a grandmother, and a friend. During these many years, Emma recounts the times she has with the four great loves of her life: her ex-husband Marc; Scott Olson, the man who helps her rear her son; her former professor, the libidinous poet Garnett de Vere; and Michael FitzRobert, the self-made millionaire with whom she hopes to spend the rest of her life.
In addition to recounting her time with these four men as well as other romantic escapades, Emma also shares her relationships to her parents, Henry and Elizabeth Aspen; her counselors, Dr. Agatha Harbrace and Dr. Leah Friedmann; and her three closest friends: her rich Rosedale roommate Penny Porter; her high school friend, the feisty feminist Ginny Wheelock; and her sorority sister, Sara Keatson Woodley. However, the prime relationship Emma has is with her adopted son Peter, a relationship that, over forty years, generates both happiness and heartache.
As the eventual owner of a real estate agency, Emma is an upper-middle class white woman who spends most of her life in Iowa. Perhaps what makes Emma so likeable is that she is inordinately beautiful, fairly honest about her character flaws, smart, compassionate, and hopeful. But she does make mistakes. In October 2007, at their 30th college reunion, Emma is alone with Marc, and both of them--naked!-- reveal so much about themselves in a dramatic scene. The next time they are alone occurs in 2021 when, as grandparents, they are in the Illinois kitchen of their son Peter and his wife Ellie. And once again, so much is revealed.
In June 2021, Emma meets a young woman, Pamela Jennison, while in the New York apartment of her old friend Penny. As Emma talks with Penny's niece Pamela, Emma demonstrates some of her strongest traits--her abilities to glean information about another human being, to empathize, to celebrate the commonalities of the human condition. Her former lover Garnett, the poet fond of alliteration, who had considered Emma his muse, had nicknamed her his "Glamorous Gleaner." At the end of Emma and Pamela's conversation, there is a surprise, a surprise that even Emma did not see coming!
