Her further impossible job is to persuade , encourage, them to write a book detailing their experiences. They cannot focus on this project. They sleep, smoke, drink vast quantities of wine, are delusional, amok, "undisciplined, and terrified, and aflame with self-pity."
A gentle artist conflicted about her own past as a bomber, missing William, her jailed lover/mentor/teacher, outcast and lonely to the bone, Jenny finds herself chatting with people, doing things she knows to be dangerous, "introducing herself to the hardware-store owner, the train conductor, the librarian. Compensating, she knew, for her strangeness - not just her strangeness to this town, but her lone Asian face...Sometimes she longed for a companion...A confidante, to make sure that she didn't break down and confide in the plumber."
The Patty Hearst character is called Pauline, and ultimately this is the story of how she becomes that longed-for companion and confidante, of the friendship that develops between the lonely philosophical Jenny and the confused and frightened Pauline. During the difficult months of isolation, the two women live a slow dance of growing trust, painted in exquisite brush strokes: small moments of daily life, absurd moments of revolutionary posturing, bloodsoaked moments of terror. After a robbery planned by the outlaws goes awry and results in a murder, Jenny and Pauline go on the lam in an ill-planned journey with no clear destination.
During this odyssey of backroads Americana Jenny and Pauline form a bond of sisterhood, which strengthens in the months they live together in what turns out to be the journey's end: home, the Bay area, the place they both fled, the place they go to earth. That after their track-down and arrest Pauline betrays Jenny and their avowed sisterhood is not really a surprise, but it is a betrayal that hurts on many levels.
(Part 3 - the last one, really - continues)
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