Summary

Alice, a young woman struggling with the high expectations placed on her as a musical talent, suffers a hand injury that destroys her promising career. After dropping out of her freshman year at university, she returns home, where she sinks into a crippling despair.

Recognizing that their daughter is in desperate need of help, her parents have her institutionalized, but on the psych ward, despite electroshock, therapy and medication, she feels further isolated from what she treasures most: friends, family and the piano. 

She eventually begins to improve, and after almost a year, but without a plan for her future, she is released home. There she spends time with old friends, playing tennis, having coffees, watching movies and playing ping-pong at her best friend’s house. There she meets Sam, a happy-go-lucky teenager whose good-natured exuberance enables Alice to look beyond the dead end that has led her nowhere. Although Sam is only seventeen and Alice is twenty one, they fall deeply in love and begin an affair.

She decides not to return to school. Instead, realizing that only she can take control of her life, she leaves her parents’ home and moves to an apartment in a nearby town, where she works part-time as an art students’ model and attends night school, spending much of her free time with Sam. Ping-pong tournaments, a role in repertory theater, her love for Sam:  all of that provides a path to recovery.

One fall evening, when Sam is with her in her apartment, Alice explains to him that their time together is over. Sensing she has outgrown him, Sam, swallowing the hurt of being eliminated from the life of someone he loves, wishes her well and leaves.

Alice makes new friends and eventually joins a commune, where she explores art, writes poetry, and plays piano for fun. After a series of casual but passionate relationships, she falls in love with a man her own age and travels with him across Canada to British Columbia, where they settle and have four sons.

Over the years, as life takes unexpected turns, intimacies settle into complacency. Many years pass until a chance encounter finds Alice and Sam at a funeral for an old friend. Instead of allowing the sadness of the past get in their way, they embrace the joy of seeing each other, and discover that they want more.