Plot
Jeremy is an émigré from Manchester who owns a small New York City cafe. The cafe becomes a haven for Elizabeth as she tries to recover emotionally following the end of an affair. She finds comfort in the blueberry pie he bakes daily despite the fact that none of his other customers ever order it.
Elizabeth, now calling herself Lizzie, eventually drifts to Memphis, Tennessee, where she takes two jobs, waitress by day and barmaid by night, in order to earn enough money to finance the purchase of a car. She regularly sends postcards to Jeremy without revealing where she lives or works and, although he tries to locate her by calling all the restaurants in the area, he fails to find her. Later on, he decides to send out postcards to any restaurants she may be to try to find her.
One of Lizzie's regulars at both jobs is local policeman Arnie Copeland, an alcoholic who cannot accept the fact his wife Sue Lynne has left him and is flaunting her freedom by openly socializing with other men. He confesses to Lizzie his many attempts at achieving sobriety have ended in failure. One night, he drunkenly threatens his estranged wife with his gun if she leaves, then crashes his car and is killed. Lizzie comforts Sue Lynne, who gives her the money towards Arnie's tab at the bar Lizzie works at in the evening, before leaving town.
Heading west, Elizabeth – now calling herself Beth – gets another waitress job at a casino in a small town in Nevada. Here she meets Leslie, an inveterate poker player who has lost all her money. Beth agrees to lend her $2200 in exchange for a third of her winnings or her car if she loses. When she does lose, she fulfills her promise by giving Beth the car, but asks her to drive her to Las Vegas so she can borrow money from her father, whom she has not seen in a long time. While en route she receives a call from a Vegas hospital, where her father has been admitted and is dying. Leslie believes the call is simply a ruse to lure her home, but upon arrival in Vegas she discovers her father died the previous night. Leslie announces she wants to keep the car, which she had stolen from her father, who had sent her the title and registration despite their estrangement. She confesses she really won the card game and gives Beth her promised share of the winnings, which she uses to finally purchase the car she always wanted.
Elizabeth returns to Manhattan and, discovering her ex-boyfriend has vacated his apartment and moved on with his life, returns to the cafe, where Jeremy has had a stool at the counter reserved for her ever since she left. As she eats a slice of blueberry pie, Elizabeth realizes her feelings for him are reciprocated.
Read more about this topic: My Blueberry Nights
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
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“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)