Publisher's presentation : A woman recalls with painstaking cynicism the week that turned her life around fifty years earlier. In 1964, at the age of twenty-four, she lives with her alcoholic father in a dilapidated house near Boston and works as a receptionist in a prison for juvenile offenders. She endures this grim existence with a mixture of helplessness, anger and hatred - mostly for herself. The arrival of a fascinating young woman, fresh out of Harvard, to work with the inmates, is the catalyst.