The novel is structured using a "frame narrative". It opens in the present (the late 1940s), where Patrick is now a grown, married man with a ten-year-old son named Michael. At the end of the first book, the irrepressible Aunt Mame had "kidnapped" Michael for what was supposed to be a brief summer trip to India. Two years have passed with almost no word from them. To pacify and reassure his panicked wife that Mame is actually a responsible chaperone, Patrick recounts the wild, unedited tales of his own teenage travels with his aunt. 

When Patrick was 17 and fresh out of prep school, Mame took him on an extended tour of Europe that quickly spiraled into a global trek before he started college. Across their journey, Mame drags Patrick through a series of increasingly absurd, madcap vignettes.