"It's 2 AM on a Saturday night in the spring of 2001, and twenty-eight-year old Cecily Gardner sits alone in a dive bar on New York's Lower East Side, questioning her life. Feeling lonesome and homesick for the Midwest, she wonders if she'll ever make it as a reporter in the big city--and whether she made a terrible mistake in breaking up with her longtime boyfriend Matthew. As Cecily reaches for the phone to call him, she hears a guy on the barstool...

Her belief in the power of beauty shattered when her fiancé dumps her for a plain woman, a pregnant Darcy flees to London and struggles to rebuild her glamorous life before realizing that her past methods no longer work.