Joan Mitchell has two suitors, and can't decide whom to marry. A witness to her mother Aurelie's less than successful romantic history, she'd like to skip marriage altogether. Joan and Aurelie live together in a beautiful French Quarter home on Coliseum Street in New Orleans, along with Joan's many half-sisters born of Aurelie's five disastrous marriages.

Joan lives a mostly carefree life, but when she becomes pregnant, she chooses to end her pregnancy rather than marry a man she doesn't love—a decision with grave consequences in conservative 1950s New Orleans.