A housewife, increasingly disenchanted with her homemaker role, looks for new meaning in her life and organizes a discussion group, changing the lives of her six closest friends.

Although the story is about mature married women who look into the abyss of their existence, and whose lives are changed by what they see, it has more to say about the human condition than it does about women's liberation. The story is unnerving, because the small concessions that the women ask from life are so difficult for them to obtain. They reach out to one another with subdued desperation, fearful that if they raise their expectations they will be only more frustrated. The women - and the men who are inextricably part of them as lovers, providers, adversaries or friends - are neither symbols nor stereotypes. They are only human, hungering for ways to change their lives for the better, and inevitably discovering that change is never accomplished without pain.—alfiehitchie