"It's 1997, and snow is blanketing a New England beach. Two befuddled seven-year-olds watch as their mother's body is tipped overboard a crumbling boat. A Viking funeral, followed by a raucous wake. A send-off fit for soap opera star: Susan Bliss. Fifteen years earlier, Susan is a blazing, beautiful young woman, passionate about her art. It's impossible not to fall in love with her, and so Alcott, a practical professor, does-hopelessly. And so begins the love story of Susan's two-paneled life: an unconventional, jetlag-filled arrangement that takes her back and forth between her life in New England as a wife and mother to young twins to the bright lights of Los Angeles, where she becomes the beloved star of a daytime soap. In the present, Susan's twins grow up in the shadow of her all-consuming absence. Sebastian, a sensitive artist, cleaves to her memory, fascinated with the artifacts of her starry past - old script notes, photographs, tabloid gossip columns - while Viola, resentful of her mother's torn allegiances, distances herself from the memories of a mother too caught up in her silly dreams to be present for her children. But when Viola runs into her mother's old friend and co-star Orson Grey - now a renowned Hollywood star - she finds herself falling deeply in love with him and begins to put together the pieces of a mother she never really knew."--Provided by publisher.