We meet Isadora Wing, a Jewish journalist who lives in the Upper West Side of New York City. She traveling to Austria for a psychoanalyst conference, the first one to take place since the Holocaust. She notices many of the therapists in attendance are people she has actually been the patient of in her own personal psychotherapy. She thinks of terrorism as she flies.
She meets a Langian analyst in Vienna named Adrian Goodlove. The name suits him, since the two quickly fall into an affair. She notices that their reckless sexuality is poorly hidden—they like everyone to know they are sleeping together.
Isadora's husband Bennett is also in attendance, because he's also a therapist, and he walks in on Isadora while she is having sex with Adrian. Bennett throws them both for a loop by asking if he can join in. They all three have a romp in the hay, and afterwards, Bennett never speaks of it again.
Isadora writes a painstaking letter to Bennett, and the letter is hyperbolic and melodramatic. She writes the letter as a way of saying goodbye, but she never delivers it, although she has the chance. Isadora and Adrian leave the conference together, camping every night, driving through Europe by day. They tell each other stories as they pass through France, Germany, and Italy.
She tells of her first husband, a genius whose unimaginable intelligence drove him toward schizophrenic illusions of grandeur, until he believed he was the second coming of Christ. He was violent toward her, and he even raped her once, and beat her brutally. It was a breach of mental health, so she institutionalized him until finally he filed for divorce.
When they come back to Vienna, she rejoins her husband and they head home, but before she can get to him, she is molested by a sexual predator. She realizes that her sexual fetish for being raped was misguided, and she rejects the fantasy, having been horrified by the real life events.
