A woman is writing a novel. She is the Writer. Each evening, her partner comes home and they talk about her work that day. He is the Reader. Her novel describes a married couple and their attempts to cope with the revelation that the husband has been seeing prostitutes over a number of years. The wife is torn between her radical feminist past, when she made friends with a streetwalker, and the hatred she feels for the women who have ruined her marriage. The husband becomes increasingly alienated as his world collapses around him. The Writer uses more and more details of her partner's life to define the character of the husband, while the Reader bridles at the controlling mentality he sees in both the Writer and the wife. The boundary between fiction and fact dissolves until the fate of the Reader and Writer is in the hands of the characters they have created.