GONER examines the ties between real and imagined lives, between character and narrator, and the entwined ways that a family survives by creating its own myth. The novel follows the lives of four sisters from a progressive household in the Deep South. The narrative begins with their northern mother's arrival in a Louisiana army town as a young newspaper reporter in 1943 and her hasty marriage to a genteel older man....In 1980 after their enigmatic mother's death, the sisters return home and discover a devastating secret.