Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: brilliant, nerve wracked, gay, and miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras for the wedding of her identical twin to a nice doctor from Connecticut. She is, however, hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Cassandra appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken — at once utterly impossible and surprisingly sympathetic. She reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels ought to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the one life that is hers.