Growing up in Queens in the 1960s, Alyse Myers always yearned for more in life as she watched her mother settle for an unhappy marriage, an unsatisfying job, and a joyless existence. Alyse rejected everything about her mother’s life, but after her death, she inherited a small wooden box whose contents revealed a deeply moving truth.

The dysfunctional relationship between Myers and her mother is poignant and heartbreaking at times. This is an honest look at how two very different and conflicting personalities inhabit the mother-daughter relationship and how Myers learned to reconcile her relationship with her mother after her death.