Jill McCorkle

This is the story of Virginia Turner Ballard, know to her North Carolina relatives as Ginny Sue. It's also the story of her mother, her grandmother, her great aunts, her closest cousin—three generations of women who gather around Virginia to help her at the end of a hard pregnancy, to tend to her, to help her prepare for the fourth generation. This kind of family attendance, this kind of tending to, is Southern to the core, offering, as it does,

...

Retired couple Lil and Frank seek to understand the parents they each lost as children. Lil sifts through letters, notes, and diary entries, and Frank repeatedly visits the house where he lived as a boy. A young single mother, Shelley, lives there now, and Frank's repeated visits trigger memories of her own family, memories she'd hoped to keep buried.