In a steam-filled diner in a college town Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student reading. The seventeen-year-old new to everything around her—college the East Coast bodies of literature and the sexual flurries of student life—is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her. When Flannery finds herself enrolled in a class with the remote brilliant older woman she is intimidated at first but gradually becomes Anne Arden's student—Baudelaire lipstick colors or how to travel with a lover—Flannery proves an eager pupil until one day learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.
