Combining elements of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, the story focuses on eighteen-year-old Purslane Hominy Will, who leaves the Florida trailer park where she lives with her abusive boyfriend to return to her hometown of New Orleans following the drug overdose death of her jazz singer mother Lorraine, a free spirit she had not seen for several years. The girl is startled to discover one-time Auburn University professor of literature Bobby Long and his protégé and former teaching assistant, struggling writer Lawson Pines, living in her dilapidated childhood home. Both men are heavy drinkers who spend their days smoking numerous cigarettes, quoting Dylan Thomas, Benjamin Franklin, and T.S. Eliot, playing chess, and spending time with the neighbors while Bobby strums a guitar and sings melancholy country-folk songs…