Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her ballerina sister, Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home. Decades later, happily divorced, recently moved, and full of new energy, Edith has fashioned a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend, Méabh, receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child her mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of connection and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and the fractured history of her own family.

A middle-aged Jewish journalist turned novelist and playwright, consumed with anxiety about everything under the sun, Baum’s turgid philosophical books receive tepid reviews and his prestigious New York publisher has dropped him. His third marriage is on the rocks and he suspects his handsome and successful younger brother may have seduced his Harvard-educated wife. In a moment of irrationality, he has impulsively tried to kiss a pretty young journalist during an interview that she is about to go public with. Is it any wonder Baum has started talking to himself? Meanwhile he learns a startling secret that could cause havoc should he expose it.

As a blockbuster actor gives away his fortune and dates a young influencer, his longtime friend reflects on their shared past while a struggling filmmaker dreams of artistic freedom, all three perspectives converging amidst Hollywood’s illusions, inequities, and elusive intimacies.