In accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if she'd never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A student's affair with a professor results in a pregnancy that alters the course of her life forever. Even the experience of reading is investigated as one that can create a profound transformation: an arresting and incisive vision into these alternative realities, a collection that ponders the constraints all face given the circumstances of birth and temperaments, and that examines the competing pressures and expectations on women in particular. Finely attuned to the nuances of social and psychic selves.