Editing One True Thing (section)

==Plot==
Ellen Gulden has a high-pressure job writing for [[New York magazine|''New York'' magazine]]. Ellen is visiting her family home for her father George's [[surprise party|surprise]] birthday party. It becomes obvious that she deeply admires George, a once-celebrated novelist and literature professor at [[Princeton University]], but Ellen has barely restrained disdain for her mother, Kate, and the domestic life she lives.

When it is discovered that Kate has cancer, George pressures Ellen to come home and take care of her mother. Ellen is taken aback by this request, knowing it could jeopardize her career and love interest. However, she eventually agrees, caving into her father's appeals and inducements.

As Ellen helps her mother with domestic chores while her father goes about his usual business without helping much, Ellen begins to reassess her views of her parents. She realizes she always brushed her mother aside and idealized her father, despite his self-centered focus on his career and, she discovers, a longtime habit of having flings with his female students.

Ellen attempts to find a place for herself in her parents' life while struggling to continue writing on a [[freelance writer|freelance]] basis and maintain her relationship with her boyfriend in New York. Over time, Ellen grows closer to her mother and learns more about her parents' marriage—including realizing that Kate has known about George's affairs all along. Ellen also learns that her father's philandering days have become lonely nights of drinking at a local bar to numb the pain of never again achieving success with, nor even being able to complete, further novels. George admits to Ellen the reason he loved Kate was that she was full of light shining through everything, and he could not bear the thought of her light slipping away.

As her mother is dying, Ellen tells her she loves her, and Kate says she knew it and always had. At the funeral, Ellen ends her relationship with her boyfriend.

After Kate's death, the autopsy reveals that Kate actually died of morphine [[drug overdose|overdose]]. A district attorney questions Ellen about her mother's death. Scenes from this interview are interspersed throughout the movie and raise the suspicion that Ellen assisted her mother's suicide. In the closing scene, by Kate's grave, Ellen has returned from a new job she found in New York with the ''[[Village Voice]]''. She is planting daffodils when her father approaches and tells her that she was very brave to do what she did. She looks puzzled until she realizes George thinks she had given her mother the fatal overdose. Ellen replies that she had thought the accomplice was the father. They both realize Kate must have killed herself.

George speaks to Ellen about how much he loved Kate, considering her his [[muse]], his "one true thing." Ellen explains to her father how to plant the daffodil bulbs and he helps her, foreshadowing their reconciliation based on a mutual and long-overdue appreciation of Kate.