In Dog Flowers, Danielle Geller tells us what is wrong with her family: heavy drinking, abandonment, grief. The intensity of her suffering breathes throughout the book. Dog Flowers is a private look into a troubled and chaotic world.

Geller begins her memoir with heartache. Her mother, Laureen "Tweety" Lee, suffers a seizure and heart attack at the age of 49. Tweety's daughters react differently to this event. Eileen is an emotional wreck, sobbing on the phone in despair, while older sister Danielle is pragmatic. When she sees her mother in a hospital bed, unresponsive, Danielle sadly says, "I came as soon as I could." Strangely, her mother's foot is still seizing while the rest of her is motionless. Danielle rubs the foot but is unable to kiss her mother.

Geller writes of her emotional state once back home in Boston, her mother dead and cremated, "I was not learning how to grieve ...