A trio of stories based around the writer, Virginia Woolf. In the first, set in 1923, Woolf is writing her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. In the second, in 1949 Los Angeles, Laura Brown can't seem to stop reading Woolf. In the present, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility.