The young Lillian and her friend Julia, daughter of a wealthy family being brought up by her grandparents in the United States, enjoy a childhood together and an extremely close relationship in late adolescence. Later, while medical student/physician Julia attends University of Oxford and the University of Vienna and studies with such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Lillian, a struggling writer, suffers through revisions of her play with her mentor and sometime lover, famed author Dashiell Hammett, at a beachhouse.