Aunt Dan and Lemon opens with Lemon, a sickly young woman living in London, directly addressing the audience, promising to tell “everything about my life.” She lives alone in an apartment and subsists entirely on bread and the fruit and vegetable juices she considers her friends. She explains that her parents are dead and that she has little to do but sleep, masturbate, and read, mostly about the Nazi death camps. Her monologue is interrupted by scenes from the past, memories of her life with her parents and events experienced by others about which Lemon has been told. Lemon’s father, Jack, is an American who studied at the University of Oxford and stayed in England after he married Susie, a fellow student. Jack describes his idealistic, romantic view of England and then contrasts it with the intensity of the country’s economic life and the difficulties he encounters as an executive in an automobile-parts company. Susie recounts how she met Danielle, a young American tutor at Oxford, who introduced her to Jack. Lemon explains that her Aunt Dan began calling her Lemon—Leonora is her given name—and that her parents and Aunt Dan were very close when she was a child, spending long evenings together in the garden of their suburban London home discussing books, playing charades, and listening to Susie read. This idyllic friendship begins to fall apart when Lemon’s parents disagree with Aunt Dan’s evolving political philosophy.

Before this estrangement, Lemon gradually moves across the garden from the main house to the small house Jack had intended to use as a study, and Aunt Dan visits her there:. . . it was an amazing thing that a person like Aunt Dan would spend all that time talking to an eleven-year-old child who wasn’t even that bright, talking about every complicated subject in the world, but listening to Aunt Dan was the best, the happiest, the most important experience I’d ever had.

Lemon considers this intellectual who speaks to her as an equal to have been her only friend. Among the many subjects Aunt Dan tells her about is her sex life, particularly her affair with a married professor when she was a student. Aunt Dan does not, however, simply talk about herself but attempts to instruct Lemon in her view of the world, as when she tells the girl never to be rude to people in subservient positions.

Although Aunt Dan professes to know nothing of politics, these talks begin to change in the early 1970’s when she becomes enamored of Henry Kissinger, the adviser on international affairs, specifically the Vietnam War, to then president Richard M. Nixon. Aunt Dan constantly defends everything about Kissinger, from his policies to his dating attractive young women: “If he enjoys life, maybe he’ll be even more inspired to do his job of preserving life, to help us all lead the life we want!” She explains Kissinger’s strategies to Lemon: “He’s trying to get the North Vietnamese in a corner, so they’ll have to negotiate on his terms.”

Her adoration of Kissinger intensifies when she visits Washington, D.C., and sees him meeting a friend for lunch. Aunt Dan considers this friend stupid and repellent but is moved by Kissinger’s happiness at seeing him: “this is a man who loves his country, and he loves the people of his country. To Kissinger . . . the very crudeness and grossness of this man were his most American, and therefore almost his most wonderful, features.” Lemon fantasizes about running away to live with Aunt Dan and having Kissinger drop in for Sunday breakfast. She is...