All of the members of the Hildebrandt family are siloed into their own private conflicts throughout most of the novel, but none is as lonely as Marion when the novel begins. A pastor’s wife who knows how she is expected to behave, Marion has no close friends and is considered by most of her neighbors to be a blandly kind mother. “As soon as people had met her,” the narrator explains in Section 5, “and identified her position in the community, situated her at the Very Nice end of the all-important niceness spectrum, she became invisible to them” (127). Marion is invisible to her own family as well. Her children hardly ever think about her, and her husband Russ actively dislikes her when the novel starts. He is resentful that she has gained weight since he met her and sees her as the source of most of his problems. As the narrator says in a section from Becky’s perspective, “Family life was like a microcosm of high school. Her mother wasn’t popular” (80).

Over the novel’s three years, all of the Hildebrandt family members—with the exception of Judson, whose perspective the reader does not see—face some sort of turning point involving a choice that will affect their lives for years to come.