In mid-20th century Paris, a young woman ends her engagement, hoping to be with another man. When things do not go as planned, however, the young woman struggles to meet both her own wants and desires and her parents' expectations.

In the 1930s, after flunking out of college, a young American man travels to Vienna where he meets a Jewish girl living on the floor below him. He returns home a few months later, but when the Nazis invade Vienna he can't help but think of the girl he once knew.

A man describes the evidence leading up to an explanation for the recent death of an atheist in a religious society.

A teenage girl spends her summer riding horses to waste time while she waits for a letter from her recently enlisted boyfriend to come.

A twenty-two-year-old male tutor gives various women feedback on their writing in letter form. When he quits his job, he visits one of his former correspondents for lunch at her apartment.

In 1950s Canada, two girls see each other for the last time on a bus ride home from college. Over the following summer vacation, their lives change irrevocably due to boyfriends and pregnancy scares.

Through a series of letters in her notebook, an adolescent girl documents her bizarre and often uncomfortable experience at "wife camp," and explores patriarchal gender norms and marital expectations.

A woman struggles to care for her son, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man and has now lived in a mental hospital for over ten years.

Upon hearing about an upcoming wedding, a former American soldier reminisces about the time he met a young girl who gave him the recourse to survive the war.

When her mother's ouija board instructs her to move from Boston to South Carolina, a young girl befriends another girl her age who is totally her opposite in all respects and treats her friend's second family as her own.