Michelle is a poet who waffles between envy and anger as she watches her former best friend, now a famous broadcast journalist, shape the news into ever more right-wing narratives. Until finally Michelle arrives at a gleeful moment of poetic justice: Cynthia, who has succeeded through a combination of backstabbing and talent, is exposed as a fraud on the front page of The New York Times-and her jowls, 'those sad pouches of defeated flesh, ' are on display for all to judge. An exploration of friendship and envy, politics and poetry, television and justice and what's gone wrong with America, starting in the fifties when Michelle and Cynthia are little and ending more than sixty years later. At the close of each decade, the story jumps to a Friday in 2015 where we find Cynthia struggling to cope with her new-found infamy, while Michelle gloats, and worries, and hosts a dinner party.