Mary, a Rust Belt farm girl, the bastard child of an unwed,
unconventional single mother, claws her way out of poverty and weds, but
soon stumbles over the myth of monogamy. When her first husband, Don,
dies, she seeks a more honest, equitable relationship, determined that
her infant son, Billy, will not be a fatherless child as she was. The
day before she leaves on a freighter for Greece, she meets Isaac in the
East Village, and their romance blooms as they shuttle back and forth
between Brooklyn and Crete. In addition to the distance between them,
however, Mary must also take on Isaac’s conventional Jewish mother and
all her beliefs about how and where they should live.
Fatherless, Fearless, Female
follows the international adventures of the dauntless Mary as she moves
from a mob-operated strip joint in Chicago to the vineyards and
villages of Crete, from art schools in New York and Jerusalem to the
Imperial Iranian Air Force Base in Isfahan during the revolution of ’78.
Along the way, she navigates through a maze of broken vows, broken
families, and broken educational systems—and learns, at last, the value
of love and the true meaning of her mother’s deathbed story.