What is it about a big city that makes people think they have to know everything? And everyone? What exactly are all those frantic urbanites up to anyway? So wonders Kay Pritchard, an uptight-straight-white-girl from New Brunswick, who is trying to finish a screenplay without losing her bottom-of-the-totem-pole job at the CBC.

Meanwhile Claire, Kay's spirited but spiritually disorganized younger sister, is trying to complete her education, but keeps getting waylaid by smarty-pants Ph.D. students with Jean-Paul Sartre glasses, beautiful red-haired dykes with muscles and love-sick painters - not to mention the worry of a possible pregnancy.

Then there's Will, a gay actor and Kay's long-time confidante, a talented young thing on the rise until he falls head over heels for a guy who looks "as if he's just fallen from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel." Told through letters, confessional monologues and stream-of-consciousness narratives, Kay Darling travels from Toronto to LA and back again on a funny, moving and lively trip through that time in your life when you're almost grown up, almost successful, and almost broke.