Tanya Harris is a forty-something mother and homemaker, and a part time, moderately successful writer of short stories and soap opera scripts. Tanya is a beautiful woman with stable, happy teenagers, a fulfilling and sexually active marriage, a career she loves, and no desire for any other life. She has long given up on her dream of someday writing a screenplay, but then her agent calls with an offer that's very hard to refuse: a major director wants her and her alone for a new high profile film. Tanya's first reaction is distress -- her daughters are just starting their senior year, how can she leave them, even if she could be home on weekends? Her long and detailed deliberations are cut short by her attorney husband, who convinces her that this is her big opportunity, and she goes off to Hollywood reluctantly to find that everything about Bungalow 2 at the Beverly Hills Hotel is perfect. She's cosseted in every possible way by her director and producer, she takes to the work immediately and without a hitch, she learns to appreciate room service and the luxurious perks that come her way. But she misses her family. The weekend trips home aren't enough, and her worries turn out to be well founded when her husband falls prey to a lonely neighbor (165). Steel follows Tanya as she copes with the disappointment and pain of separation and divorce, all the time pushing ahead with her screenwriting career, always returning to Bungalow 2 when she starts a new project. A series of relationships, each seriously flawed, result in an epiphany that sends her back home, where what she was looking for comes to find her. Steel's characters spend a lot of time debating and contemplating problems, and Tanya is especially good at wringing her hands, a modern day and forlorn Dorothy torn between Oz and Kansas.