The story of a girl who is doing everything to hurt herself and a mother who would try anything to try to save her.

True, she had stopped coming down for breakfast. Stayed up in her room, ran out the door late for school, missed the bus and had to have a ride. But you think, well, that's how they are, aren't they, teenagers? And you try to remember how you were, but you were different and the times were different and it was so long ago. And she's suddenly so angry at you, but then, another time, she's just the same. She's just your little girl. You sit with her and you talk about something, or you go shopping for school clothes and everything seems all right. And you forget how you stood in her room and how the center of your stomach felt so cold. When you found the cigarette. When you found the blue pipe. When you found the little bag she said was aspirin.

I turn my head and stare up at the roof of the truck cab. He has no idea I'm here, and I don't know where he's going.

Upon a chance sighting of her ex-boyfriend, Virginia does something most of us have only dreamed of. Unseen, she jumps into the back of his Jeep, and remains hidden all day, observing the man she once loved. She's compelled to complete her unfinished portrait of their breakup, and relive the magical thinking of their romance.

"I knew him by heart for ten years and he me," Vir-ginia reflects. "And now, only nine months later, I know nothing at all."

The novel unfolds over the course of one day, ping-ponging between Virginia's fear of discovery and the illicit thrill of "breaking and entering" into the life of her former lover.

Will she finally confront him, as she's longed to do since they parted? Will she slink away in defeat? Any woman who has ever lived and loved will find herself swept up in Virginia's mesmerizing journey.

DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO BE FIFTEEN? MARTHA TOD DUDMAN DOES. It starts with a blue hash pipe in a shabby field and a hot, tight dance at the Mayflower Hotel, and rapidly accelerates against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of the Sixties. Describing a time weirdly similar to today, Expecting to Fly recalls a conservative government embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war, racial tensions, and a generation of disillusioned young people looking for something meaningful to believe in -- teenagers who, like Dudman, hurled themselves into a sea of drugs and sex they weren't really ready for. With the same passion and brutal honesty that she brought to her first book, Augusta, Gone -- the story of her daughter's troubled adolescence -- Dudman re-creates her own wild ride through the turbulent Sixties, vividly recounting scenes you probably experienced yourself. From the prim tradition of a posh girls' school and debutante parties of Washington, D.C., to the snows of New Hampshire and the campaign for Eugene McCarthy, from living out of a knapsack in Spain to getting stoned on acid in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Expecting to Fly takes us on a blistering trip to a time when the only thing you couldn't be was shocked. Now, years later, Dudman reflects on that time and what it means: "Which was it -- triumph, exploration, some important journey, or just a big stupid mistake, a total waste of time?" You decide.