Passing Remarks — Helen Hodgman

Two things happened to Rosemary that early summer;
she won $30,000 playing Keno at the Hakoah Club and
she fell in love with a woman much younger than herself.
Thus, laden with luck, she entered her fifty-first year. . . .


When middle-aged, academic Rosemary meets twenty-seven-year-old Billie--a woman with a tough bike and an even tougher attitude--she goes weak at the knees. Yet when Billie speeds off on a soul-searching bender through the Australian outback, Rosemary is left to ponder love and longevity, and weather a few adventures of her own.

Cooped up for the summer with the eccentric Daphne--who is busy transforming her body into a tattooed biography of her mad mother's life--Rosemary unwittingly winds up with a leading role in a lesbian porn flick, loses her car to a shears-wielding murderer, and still finds time to compost her garden and miss Billie to no end. Yet as each woman's path twists through a hilarious comedy of manners and mishaps, one fact remains: relationships lie in the sometimes capable--sometimes careless--hands of coincidence.