Summary:

This is the story of Siddalee Walker's desperate search to understand the life of her outrageous, melodramatic, beautiful, alcoholic mother, Vivi. Now a 40-year-old successful director, Sidda is estranged from Vivi because of a too-frank newspaper interview that characterized Vivi as a loving, outrageously creative, abusive mother. Putting her engagement on hold, Sidda hides away in a cabin in the northwest with the only thing her mother concedes in Sidda's efforts to make up: a scrapbook that chronicles Vivi's life with three other spirited Southern belle renegades, the Ya-Yas.

Thus, the story unfolds with scrapbook versions of Vivi's rigid Catholic upbringing and the beginnings of the Ya-Ya sisterhood, through their adolescence and bayou debutante years, through their marriages and mothering the Petites Ya-Yas. Living her mother's life through the scrapbook and with a little help from the now 60-something Ya-Yas, Sidda comes to understand her mother's character with all its lavish, passionate, sorrowful, and always humorous dimensions.

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