In the title story, which won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize in 1993, a beautiful and difficult movie star returns to her hometown after making a mess of her Hollywood life. In "There Is a River in New Orleans" a divorced woman is haunted by the memory of her mother, who was "the way Southern women were supposed to be - weak, hysterical, corrupt, ripe for slaps, Scarlett, Blanche, all that.".

In "Oslo," first published in The New Yorker, newcomers to Louisiana, frightened by its lushness and strangeness, dream about being someplace else, Jerusalem or Oslo, while their love life disintegrates around them, just beyond their notice. In "Desire" a French Quarter photographer becomes obsessed with a rich Uptown married woman who was once his model, and is now his patroness.

In "Crocheting" the narrator combats loss and grief by making a sky-blue cap for her mother, who is hospitalized and dying of cancer.

In "I Am Eleven" a woman recalls the year her brother, a high school football hero, had to marry a girl in a small Louisiana town. In "Fever" life suddenly changes for a perfectly happy married man with a beautiful baby and an ambitious wife when he is visited by Camille Hebert, a young Cajun singer with a fever of 103 degrees. And in "Gauguin," while Hurricane Andrew rages, a crusading environmental lawyer caught in Baton Rouge recalls the previous autumn when David Duke almost became governor.