Vada is obsessed with death. Her mother is dead, and her father runs a funeral parlor. When Vada's father hires Shelly, a makeup expert, and begins to fall in love, Vada is outraged and does everything in her power to split them up.
A high-school boy in the early 1970s is given the chance to write a story for Rolling Stone magazine about an up-and-coming rock band as he accompanies them on their concert tour.
A single mother, with dreams of becoming a writer, has a son at the age of 15 in 1965, and goes through a failed marriage with the drug-addicted father.