'Dear Miss Maxfield ... what I'm really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don't think it's possible there could be so many in one school, do you? - probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me ...' After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest - and saddest - love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt.