Vida Winter, a famous novelist in England, has evaded journalists' questions about her past, from simply refusing to answer their inquiries to spinning elaborate tales that they later discover to be false. Her entire life is a secret, and for over fifty years reporters and biographers have tried innumerable methods in an attempt to extract the truth from Winter. With her health quickly fading, Winter enlists Margaret Lea, a bookish amateur biographer, to hear her story and write her biography. With her own family secrets, Lea finds the process of unraveling the past for Winter bringing her to confront her own ghosts.