Ellen Gulden has a high-pressure job writing for New York magazine. As the movie begins, she is visiting her family home for her father's surprise birthday party. It becomes obvious that she deeply admires her father, George, a once-celebrated novelist and literature professor at Princeton University, but has barely restrained disdain for her mother, Kate, and the domestic life she lives and has always viewed her as a ditzy Stepford Wife. When it is discovered that Kate has cancer, George pressures Ellen to come home and take care of her mother. Ellen is taken aback by this request, knowing it could jeopardize her career and love interest, but finally agrees, caving in to her father's appeals and inducements.