A Southern Family is presumably the novel that Clare writes to tell her story. In her final conversation with Theo, he confronts her with her habit of tying everything up at the ends of her books and with rewarding the protagonists. He challenges her to write about an event that cannot be explained. And then he presents her with such an event. The whole book is an exploration of the event from every major character's point of view and reveals Clare's resolve to deal with that which cannot be neatly wrapped up.

The novel is a shifting tapestry of points of view in which readers are provided enough material about each character to attempt their own explanation of the unexplainable. As the novel opens with Julia's view of the family the evening before the tragic event, the reader finds that she associates with the Quicks only as an...