Rumor Has It

Sarah Huttinger is in a tailspin. She has agreed to marry her boyfriend, Jeff, but is terrified of going through with it. Her journalism career has stalled at the obituary desk of The New York Times. Now, her sister, Annie is plunging into marriage with her tennis partner and Sarah must return home to Pasadena, California, to attend the wedding. For as long as Sarah can remember, she has been the black sheep of her family, never knowing where she fits in. While she loves her father and sister, she can't relate to their contented lives of country clubs and tennis matches. And for her, going home is like staring down the gauntlet of the dull, settled-down life she fears is yawning out before her. The only thing that makes the trip bearable is the company of her acerbic grandmother Katharine, who lets it slip that Sarah is not the first one in the family to get cold feet--that thirty years ago, Sarah's late mother ran off with a mysterious young man days before her wedding to Sarah's father. Around the same time, there was a rumor about a young woman who ran off with a young man who had been seduced by the woman's mother, creating a huge scandal in Pasadena. The rumor became a book, and the book became a film. Now Sarah finds herself frantically searching for a copy of the 1967 film "The Graduate," believing her family may have been the inspiration for the story with Katharine as the older woman and Sarah's own mother as the young man's true love. Which leaves one question: who is the young man? Believing the long-ago story may hold the key to her true identity, Sarah puts Jeff on a plane to New York and detours to San Francisco to look up her mother's classmate, Beau Burroughs, who is now a famous internet billionaire. What she finds is definitely not her long-lost father, but someone even she could fall in love with--or at least into bed. This strange encounter with a man who embodies all the adventure and excitement she thought she longed for leads her spiraling back to what she knows best and understands least--her family.