As ten-year-old Gwyn searches for a missing neighbor in her new town in Iowa, she learns much about her mother, who grew up there but has suffered from memory loss since Gwyn was four.

A Nellie and her mother pick berries all summer in order to make enough money so that Nellie can get a coat to wear to school in the winter.

"My mother," Joy Shapiro Krushelevansky writes in her diary late one night, "is the most embarrassing person to have ever been born." It's been almost thirteen years since we've last seen Cannie Shapiro, the heroine of Good in Bed, whose journey toward happily-ever-after, and peace with her fractured family and plus-size body, made millions of women the world over laugh, cry, and see themselves on the page.

The last decade of Cannie's life...

Erin Kilpatrick has enough trouble running a rehab center for recovering alcoholics and drug abusers, taking care of her thirteen year-old daughter, and struggling to pay the bills. But finding the dead body of one of her guests, sprawled in her garden, complicates things!

Gabby has knitted mittens to give her grandfather for his birthday, and on their way to meet him, Gabby gets a new haircut and her mother gets a surprise.

While spending a summer with her famous mother and her criminal boyfriend, Sydney Reilly, age fifteen, finds love with Nicco but her premonition of something bad coming proves dreadfully accurate.

When the two grown daughters of Elizabeth Marshall discover an old diary of their mother's in her attic, it comes as a shock to learn that the true love of Elizabeth's life was not their father.