Josie Trask is a thirtyish graduate student whose husband is the pet of their American Civilization Department and whose three-year-old son is the apple of her eye. But Josie has two pressing problems. One, she's utterly bored by her unfinished dissertation on an obscure nineteenth-century poetess. Two, her husband Peter, whose career is zooming ahead, seems to be spending an awful lot of time with their fellow student and "friend" Monica.

So when a celebrity biographer (think Kitty Kelley meets Nigel Hamilton) calls with an offer - namely, Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis has just died and the publisher needs a researcher fast - Josie decides to give it a whirl. What follows are Josie's hilarious adventures as she deals with the age-old dilemmas of love, marriage, and parenthood, and as she discovers some unexpected parallels between her life and that of our most enduring icon - none other than the queen of Camelot.