As Tolstoy asserted, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This unhappy family has never confronted its unhappiness: Sweetie, so called since childhood, the apple of her father Bob's eye and the bane of her mother Flo's smothered existence. Her sister Kay is shy, superstitious, and sexually repressed where Sweetie is loud, slovenly, and quite possibly mentally ill. The family has managed to lead relatively normal lives by denying their bizarre family reality. Sweetie has terrorized her family for years, but an unexpected tragedy is about to loosen her spoiled brat grip on their psyches.