College isn't much more fun for Myrtle than high school was. At least in high school she had her weird friend Margie, who wasn't going to win any popularity contests or beauty pageants either. Now an art student at college, Myrtle has only food and her sense of humor to rely on. Her roommate, Jada, with her boyfriend and her long neck and her dancer's body and her healthy eating habits, is no help at all. Over the course of a few painful weeks in summer, Myrtle finds a path, discovering, through her painting and a prehistoric stone figure known as the Venus of Willendorf, a new sense of self and a different kind of beauty.