Anna Hand, a rambunctious, passionate, and famous Southern writer, returns home to straighten out the chaos of her family. But just as she forces her brother Daniel to face up to the responsibility of his daughter from an early marriage, she discovers that the vague malaise she has been feeling is cancer and commits suicide by walking into the sea. The papers she leaves behind shock her literary executor and sister Helen, but with the seductive help of her co-executor Helen begins her own liberation and the acceptance of Anna's adventurous--even exotic--credo of life.