Travel! Adventure! Romance! What could possibly go wrong?

It’s 1972 when free-spirited “good girl” Fay takes off on a three-year journey around the US and Europe in search of jobs, apartments, and boyfriends. She soon finds navigating her way through the real world will take a skill set her Sunday schoolteacher never taught her.

Taking off on a three-year journey across America and Europe in the early 1970s, Fay quickly learns there are three things she needs in order to be happy—an apartment, a job, and a boyfriend, a.k.a., "the holy trinity”.

Chasing after one guy while running from another, the ex-college coed takes nickel-and-dime jobs, doing everything from peddling hotdogs in Underground Atlanta to selling sewing machines door-to-door in Appalachia to leading a bicycle trip in Cape Cod. It seems there is nothing she won’t do—aside from notable exceptions like female escort and man-bait for a shady private investigator, as evidenced in the chapter, “Jobs Even I Won’t Take”.

Fay’s dirt-cheap accommodations include a garage apartment in pre-Silicon Valley, a housing project in New Orleans, a fifth-story walkup in Boston's North End, a trailer in Appalachia, and a strip mall office in Sarasota Florida. As for boyfriends, most come with a hilariously off-putting major flaw, i.e., that one thing that cannot be ignored in an otherwise perfect guy.

Powering through a series of revenge plagues rained down from the Almighty—hey, she is breaking all the rules after all—Fay must learn to reconcile her childhood groupthink with her road-trip-as-a-lifestyle existence or retreat to the soul-crushing community from which she escaped.

Part historical snapshot, part travelogue, and part confessional, Fay is every woman who has pondered the road not taken or grappled with the guilt of not being able to live up to rules she didn't even make.