Jonathan Ascher, an acclaimed 1960s radical writer and cultural hero, has been dead for thirty years. When a would be biographer approaches his widow Martha, she delves for the first time into papers that he had and all the secrets that come tumbling out of them. She finds journals that begin as a wisecracking chronicle of life at the fringes of the New York literary scene, then recount his sexual adventures in the pre-Stonewall gay underground and the social upheavals that led to his famous book JD. As Martha reads on, she finds herself in a long-distance conversation with her dead husband, fighting with him again about their rocky marriage and learning about the unseen tragedy in her own apartment that ended with the destruction of their son, Mickey.