A desperate woman in menopause begins to have strange dreams — featuring Virgin Marys, tigers, cows, Rosa Luxemburg, Marilyn Monroe, and Benito Mussolini's mother— dreams from which she wakes every night at exactly 4:30 a.m.

To interpret her nocturnal life, she seeks meetings with the women in her family: her daughter, her sister, and her mother. And while the discussions begin to untangle the threads of their shared life, the dreams suddenly stop.

She then turns to other women, from her mother Helen Topaloudi to a ten-year-old Afghan girl who suddenly lost her mother. And a parade of women begins to emerge, who give birth, adopt, care for, or refuse to care for. As their confessions accumulate and are interspersed with quizzes, board games, fairy tales, lessons in etymology, religion, and zoology, their experiences are nested within each other, like babies in their mothers' wombs.

In "The Long Journey of One Inside Another," motherhood becomes a malleable concept, a radical matter of freedom and reconciliation — a giant umbilical cord that connects and nourishes all women who have been daughters of their mothers, mothers of their daughters. But also mothers of their mothers, daughters of their daughters. A cord that nourishes all men as well: because, as the heroine states, "the world will only change if men read about the lives of women with the same naturalness that women have always read about the lives of men."