In this complex and fascinating book, Dorothy Danner of Mobile, Alabama, emerges as an intriguing example of one woman's iconoclastic actions against mid-century Southern mores and prejudices. Born into a wealthy and well-established family, she bears and reflects many of the marks of her gender, social place, and historical moment.

Struggling through adolescence, after her mother's early death, with what she perceived as emotional abandonment by a distant father, Danner acted out a social script involving servants and private schools in the South, an elite Northern college, and extensive travel abroad.

She departed, however, from her expected role by engaging in psychoanalysis, explorations of sexual identity, too much liquor and some experimentation with drugs, as well as multiple marriages, one of which ended in the somewhat mysterious suicide of her first husband.