Freshman year of college should be the time of one’s life, but for Michael Sullivan, a student at UC Santa Cruz, it's the loneliest. What’s more, he is in love with his literature TA, Helen Zachary, an older woman who barely knows he exists.
Help comes in the form of a fellow literature student, upper-classman Timothy Dylan Page, who is nursing his own wounded heart. Tim offers to guide Michael through Santa Cruz–and eventually, to his beloved Helen, who just happens to be Tim’s best friend.
Tim shows Michael that college is about much more than just classes, sections and papers, and they soon find their lives paralleling literature in unexpected ways. In the course of their journey, they discover a surprising closeness between them.
This new 20th Anniversary Edition contains the original text of the novel, a new afterword by the author, and eighty pages of never before published out-takes with author commentary.