Alice Sadie Celine

"It's opening night, but far from glamorous. Alice is performing in a local Bay Area production of The Winter's Tale, the complete opposite of what she had envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. She doesn't have dreams of superstardom per se, but the basement theatre in a wildfire-choked town simply isn't ideal. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming. Pragmatic and serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school-really one another's only friends-but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend's support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother Celine. A professor of Women's and Gender Studies at UC Berkeley, Celine's landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she's struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminism