Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person. The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother.

On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation--something she married into after Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family's crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was his family business. What caught Joe's fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time.

Soon this large-spirited divorcé with three little girls swept Beck into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family--plus a child of their own--and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.

Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family party, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. Is she an impostor in her own life? Is it indeed her own life? How she answers--how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been--is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel.