The story of Peter McGowan, a chain-smoking, impotent, insomniac playwright who lives in Los Angeles. Once very successful, he is now in the tenth year of a decade-long string of production failures. He finds himself bonding with a new neighbor's lonely young daughter who has mild cerebral palsy; and during one of his middle-of-the-night strolls, he encounters his oddball doppelgänger.

After the sudden death of her father leaves a teenage girl without a family, she becomes lost in her own anger and sadness. Her family doctor informs her that her father had a secret, that the mother she never knew was alive and well. When she travels to meet her, she befriends a horse trainer and discovers that in caring for the horse, she is able to overcome her hardships and emotional trauma. Together they begin to win many races and upset the favorites, owned by an egocentric mogul . Through the victories and new friendships she forms, she learns to find her way back to happiness.

A story about a forming friendship between an elderly nun, Sister Anthony, and New York's Rockefeller Center's head landscape architect Richard Reilly, who wants to fell a tree she's been growing for decades and move it to New York for Christmas display.