The novel is written in the stream of consciousness narrative style, and consists of a single long sentence, with brief clauses that start with the phrase "the fact that" more than 19,000 times.

The narrator spends most of her time caring for her children and making pies and other baked goods, which she sells to local restaurants and shops to shore up her family's finances.

The narrator's stream-of-consciousness takes the form of an internal dialog in which she ponders a variety of topics, ideas, recollections, and individual words in an almost-continuous list that spans the entire novel.

These include the following: what she happens to be doing at the present moment; baking and cooking; descriptions of her present-day family situation; recollections about her past; musings about individuals, family members, celebrities, and acquaintances; observations about classic American films (often The Sound of Music or Now, Voyager); observations about her favorite books (often those of Jane Austen, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lucy Maud Montgomery); expressions of anxiety about national and global problems (often widespread pollution and climate change); and admissions of her own personal problems and shortcomings.

The narrator explains that this unremitting inner dialog keeps her mind occupied so that she does not dwell on unpleasant realities (such as the doomed environment and the death of her mother), but this tactic evidently does not always succeed.

[1] These problems include the following: climate change; the mistreatment of industrial livestock (especially chickens); viral pandemics; mass shootings and other forms of violence; economic uncertainty; and the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump.

A frequently mentioned problem is the widespread pollution of the world's streams, lakes, and oceans by plastic, industrial chemicals, and pharmacological substances.

A critic writing for Kirkus Reviews said the book was an example of "literary experimentation that, while surely innovative, could have made its point in a quarter the space", and compared it with Ulysses for its size and word association games.

[10] Katy Waldman, writing for The New Yorker, called it an encyclopedic novel, a concept popularized by Edward Mendelson, as it renders "full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture".