"In the early eighties, you had the sense that there was nothing you couldn't do in L.A."[1] In Golden Days, Edith Langley, a 38-year-old divorcee returns to Los Angeles from the East Coast with her two daughters, Aurora and Denise, to start a new life in 1980.

Skip is back in the States for a medical issue—his wife and children still in Argentina where they moved after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

They fly to San Francisco to attend a weekend seminar given by Lion Boyce on "Abundance as a Natural State."

Edith fills Lorna in on her second failed marriage to Dirk Langley, an Australian surf film director.

Edith and Skip have settled into a quiet life entrenching themselves through their affluence against an increasingly unsettled world focusing on the younger daughter's school.

Aurora has fallen in love and announces she is marrying Skip's son Deeky and moving with him to South America.

[1] The next part of the novel takes a bit of a break from the main plot and deals with a period of waiting for something bad to happen.

Then the bomb hits and Edith, Skip, her daughter Denise live through the blast, subsequent fires, illness and disfigurement.

This blip is a nuclear incident in Southern Mexico, which then turns the focus of the novel on essays and meditations with the theme of "waiting around."

Part Three of the book is the aftermath of the blast itself—the death of civilization, the fires, the radiation and the survival of the heroine, her family, and neighbors.

[4] In the same interview See said that she wanted to persuade people about the possibility of nuclear war and that the thinking about the unthinkable shouldn't be left to the right-wing.

The quote from John Milton is: The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell And after all their tribulations long See golden days ...[4][5] Initial reception by major critical outlets was positive and since that time Golden Days has begun to be seen as a significant work of California fiction.

Publishers Weekly called the book an entirely new voice for See[6] and described it as if John Cheever changed gender and moved to California.