After high school, Ariane Lodkochnikov worked as a waitress in a clam bar. It was a job but not a life, so one day she took off her goofy clam hat and quit. She couldn't have guessed then that her life would take her so far from her home in Babbington, Long Island. What a Piece of Work I Am is the story of her extraordinary career and the process of self-creation that it both requires and inspires. Like a thread through a labyrinth, her story takes many a strange turn.

To tell it, she enlists the help of Peter Leroy, who loved her when he was a boy. Peter, a master of the art of wishful thinking, uses this book to give to Ariane the gift of a second chance at life, a chance to make herself into the person she might have become.

As she and Peter follow the thread of her bizarre tale, it becomes entangled with several others, including Peter's paternal grandparents' unsinkable devotion to each other, the treachery of a handsome guy named Guy, and the rise of the film director Greg Tschudin, who appropriates Ariane's stories, distorts them, and exploits them.

Told with Peter's compassion and Ariane's passion, her tale takes on the dimensions of a modern fable about artifice and deception, the ownership of our stories, the control of our lives, the making of our selves, what it means to create art, and what it means to be a work of art.

One person after another tries to take control of Ariane's life, to take from her the opportunity to make something of herself, but ultimately she finds a champion who defeats them all, in a magnificent and heartwarming triumph of devotion and imagination over treachery and despair.