It’s 1997, and snow is blanketing a New England beach. Two befuddled seven-year-olds watch as their mother’s body is tipped overboard a crumbling boat—a Viking funeral followed by a raucous wake, a send-off fit for soap opera star Susan Bliss.

Fifteen years earlier Susan is a blazing, beautiful young woman, passionate about her art. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her, and so Alcott, a practical professor, does—hopelessly. And so begins the love story of Susan’s two-paneled life, an unconventional, jetlag-filled arrangement that takes her back and forth between her home in New England as a wife and mother to young twins, and the bright lights of soapy Los Angeles.

In the present day Susan’s twins grow up in the shadow of her all-consuming absence. Sebastian, a sensitive artist, cleaves to her memory, fascinated with the artifacts of her starry past. Viola, resentful of her mother’s torn allegiances, distances herself from the memories of her. But when Viola runs into her mother’s old costar Orson Grey—now a renowned Hollywood star—she finds herself falling deeply in love with him and begins to put together the pieces of a mother she never truly knew.