Alice Kelleher is a young writer who has found an amazingly high level of success early in life and is now finding difficulty dealing with the pressures of being famous. She has arranged a date with a man she met on Tinder. Felix is a very blue-collar kind of guy who works in a factory and is absolutely not the kind of man who reads her books that she has gotten used to meeting. The date starts off pretty bad with more than a few awkward moments revealing the disconnection between them, but later the two run across each other’s path and Felix invites her to his place to meet the kind of people he thinks she needs to know in order to get away from the type of people she has been getting to know.
Meanwhile, Alice’s BFF, Eileen is also getting involved with a man. Like Alice, Eileen is a literary-minded and is employed as a magazine editorial assistant. She and Simon Costigan have actually known each other almost all their lives. In addition to not being a Tinder hook-up, Simon is probably her next closest friend after Alice. Eileen still has something going on inside that longs for former boyfriend Aidan. After a little online stalking, she discovers he has moved on and is dating someone which prompts her to hook up after all with Simon as though he were just a body on a Tinder. The next morning they attend Catholic mass together.
Speaking of Catholic mass, Alice impulsively invites Felix to go with her on a trip to Rome and this initiates a sexual relationship. While Alice and Felix on off on their Roman holiday, Eileen and Simon continue their sexual relationship until she is humiliated at a party after overhearing some women talk about Simon and his younger girlfriend Caroline. When confronted, Simon points out that Eileen had no romantic interest in him—despite his having asked her out several times—until he was already going out with Caroline. They mutually decide to go back to just being friends.
Since coming back from Rome, Felix has been making himself purposely unavailable to Alice and finally admits that he is simply not looking to get serious with anyone at the moment. When Alice seems to be okay with this arrangement, he goes back to being available and they renew their sexual relationship, but it continues to be a rocky road with tension arising from the relative differences in class and status as well as Alice’s insistence that she feels more strongly about Felix than Felix feels about her. Meanwhile, Simon has stopped seeing Carolina and confessed his love to Eileen. A year and a half later the world is gripped in the lifestyle-altering arrival of the Covid epidemic as Eileen discovers she is pregnant with Simon’s baby. Alice and Felix are also still together.
Throughout the narrative, Alice and Eileen demonstrate their friendship not through actual social contact but via email discussions. This discourse actually take sup much of the book’s content and—arguably, of course—makes for the most interesting parts of the book as the two very intelligent women virtually discuss a host of subjects, including events taking place in the world at the time.
