Winner of a 2002 Lambda Literary Award
In a steam-filled diner in a college towm, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The seventeen-year-old, new to evrything around her college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her. When Flannery finds herself enrolled in a class with remote, brilliant older woman, she is intimidated at first, but gradually becomes Anne Arden's student Baudelaire, lipstick colors, or how to travel with a lover Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.