It's the summer of 1960. The baby is almost a year old when her painfully young parents take up vacation residence in Great Aunt Dot's tiny house in New Jersey. Buddy will go to summer school and paint houses. Virginia will take care of the baby. The thing is, Buddy is almost never at home, and there are indications that he is still "seeing" his old girlfriend Irene, now married to Chick, his former best friend.

Virginia and Buddy had to get married. Little Madeline was conceived the first time they did it in Buddy's room at college, and Virginia's college asked her to leave when they found out. Her family put on a reluctant little wedding. And now? Well, as Virginia puts it, "Now that we know each other a little better it turns out we are actually strangers." Adorable Virginia . . . she's very much an actual person. And this is the story of her actual life.

There's no money, no love, no foreseeable future. Neither Virginia, who's nineteen, nor Buddy, who's just past twenty, has a clue about how to make things work.

As we watch their story unfold through Virginia's eyes, hear it in her inimitable voice, we watch every character in it - from baby Madeline to Aunt Dot's flatulent Old Dog - stand up and walk off the page to take us by the hand and lead us back to those times and attitudes, to the pathos and comedy of those miserably romantic notions of bride-and-groom happiness.