The Girl in the Photograph

Stand-up comic and semi-lapsed Catholic Allegra O'Riordan now has another identity: orphan Motherless since age three, she has just buried her father as well—fearing that with this loss, she's also forfeited any hope of knowing the history of her tight-lipped Irish family. Resigned, she sifts through her father's belongings...and finds a picture that will change her life. In this picture, her mother—until now just a dim memory of a solemn, melancholy woman—is someone she barely recognizes. She is younger, of course—but there is something else. The bathing suit. The bold, seductive smile. And the mysterious inscription: "darling Ted"...Yearning to know more, Allegra begins to seek out distant relatives, strangers, old friends of her mother. She wants to understand who this flirtatious young beauty really was—and what it was that changed her.

But looking too closely at the girl in the photograph may forever alter the way she sees the girl in the mirror...