Writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison has a successful yet dysfunctional Black family. So dysfunctional that after he’s chastised at an emergency faculty meeting for tormenting his undergraduate students by exposing them to a short story by Flannery O’Connor with the N-word in the title, he balks at his supervisor’s suggestion that he take some time to go home and relax. “If you’re under the impression that time spent with my family will take the edge off, I’m fine,” Monk replies.
Back home, we learn that his mother’s mental state is slipping due to Alzheimer’s, his sister who is his mother’s caretaker fills him in on the situation—and then dies from a sudden heart attack. His brother, a plastic surgeon whose life has recently imploded because his wife (now ex-wife) discovered he was sleeping with men, is back home for the funeral and on a drug-induced bender, reeling from the death of his sister and the pain of feeling like an outcast in his family.
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