When Viola Bagg, on the lam from a retirement home, crashes into a pond in a plane piloted by fellow octogenarian Jackson Pancake, she is trapped in an air bubble formed by the windshield. As she awaits rescue, she sorts through the contents of her handbag and recounts to herself the story of her life. Born on the tropical island of Wallawalhalla at the turn of the century, Viola spent a straitlaced childhood in Canada, returning to the island as a young woman.

There she outgrew her best friend, met her husband, narrowly escaped a volcanic eruption, and may or may not have murdered her handsome host.

Sixty years later, she has moved into the Sunset Home in Conflux, North Carolina, to be near her chaotic daughter, whose rustic life she understands not at all. Bored with decades of self-enforced propriety, she tells her family she is going back to Wallawalhalla, impersonates a glamorous stranger, and finally comes to terms - as her air supply dwindles - with the ghosts of her past.