The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are thirty-five thousand feet about the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband, Joseph, is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan he flames of his career, has finally decided to stop. From this gripping opening, Meg Wolitzer flashes back to 1950s Smith...

The story of the couple's youthful passion and ambition interwoven with a portrait of a marriage, thirty-plus years later, a lifetime's shared compromises, secrets, betrayals, and mutual love.

An "illustrated chain of entanglements (romantic and otherwise) between some of our best-loved writers and artists of the twentieth century ... from Frida Kahlo to Colette to Hemingway to Dali; from Coco Chanel to Stravinsky to Miles Davis to Orson Welles"--Back cover. "A vibrantly illustrated chain of entanglements (romantic and otherwise) between some of our best-loved writers and artists of the twentieth century--fascinating, scandalous, and surprising,"--Amazon.com....