A modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime: they form her biography, from childhood to death. The first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family's Moscow apartment. The child reaches adolescence; leaves home to study in America; and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love, but her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. A college classmate, sure of his path through life and protective of her, drifts with her into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts-- until one day she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.