The book is composed of a series of stories or vignettes, all centered around a different woman. Some of them have some slight overlap, such as one person's sister in the one story may have been at an asylum for eating disorders with another one when she was younger, but I didn't find an obvious connection between every single story. The first and the last center around the same character, and she is the only one with two chapters from her perspective.
The chapters and book address different times and issues in women's lives, and most of the women are all around a similar age. By that I mean that they appear to have all been teens in the '70s or so, not that each story revolves around a 20 year old woman. As a result, there are a high school senior, two different college age women and their stories, as well as older women dealing with questions about motherhood (whether to have a child, how to balance career and home, whether to balance career and home).
Overall, this book didn't really stand out to me too much. I liked the story about the couple that adopted a dog after a miscarriage, and also thought the story about the woman returned home from college with only a semester left were particularly well done. So there are definitely things I found worthwhile in the book, and I didn't feel like it was a waste of time, but it also wasn't quite at that point where I would rave about it or tell others about it. I will also say, though, that I'm generally more of a novel person than a short story person so someone else could easily have a different reaction.
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