Three brothers grow up hungry and wild, modeling themselves after Paps, who disciplines them with harsh spankings.

Paps dances to Tito Puente with the boys in the kitchen and calls them 'mutts' for being unable to mambo.

Ma is found in bed with a swollen, bruised face on the narrator's seventh birthday.

Paps lets go of Ma and the narrator in the lake, forcing them both to learn to swim.

The narrator survives near-drowning by instinct after being shoved underwater, surfacing to find his parents overjoyed.

Paps abandons the family for an extended period, leaving Ma unable to feed or care for the boys.

Paps takes a night security guard job and brings the boys to sleep near the vending machines at work.

Paps loses his security guard job after slapping a replacement guard's coffee cup out of his hand.

Paps returns home drunk and forcibly drags Ma upstairs to have sex with her while the boys watch helplessly.

Ma takes the boys to a park with their belongings packed into garbage bags in the truck bed.

Ma asks the boys whether they want to leave Paps; they cannot answer and she drives them all home.

Paps takes only the narrator to Niagara Falls and holds him out over the railing above the crashing water.

The narrator has his first sexual experience with a male bus driver in the back of a parked bus.

The narrator comes home to find his whole family has read his journal revealing secret sexual fantasies about men.

Paps tenderly bathes the narrator and clips his toenails before the family drives him to a psychiatric facility.

The three brothers—Manny, Joel, and the unnamed narrator—grow up hungry, wild, and shaped by their volatile father Paps, whose discipline is brutal and whose love is unpredictable. After Paps beats Ma and later abandons the family entirely, Ma falls into a depression that leaves the boys fending for themselves. When Paps secures a night security job, the brief stability collapses when he loses it in a confrontation, and the violence at home intensifies until he drags Ma upstairs and rapes her. In the aftermath, Ma loads the boys into a truck and drives to a park, silently weighing whether to leave—but when the boys cannot answer her plea for guidance, she drives them all back home. As the narrator grows older and diverges from his brothers, he secretly visits a bus station where he has his first sexual experience with a man, returning home to find his entire family has read his journal. His violent outburst after this discovery ends with Paps bathing him tenderly before the family drives him to a psychiatric facility.

The headline events that define the family's turbulent life.

The boys cover themselves in smashed tomatoes and moisturizer; Ma says they look just like they did at birth.

The boys pour ketchup over Ma on the kitchen floor so she can be 'born' again.

Ma smashes the bedroom mirror and asks the boys if they think it's funny when men beat their mother.

Ma rocks the narrator on her lap and whispers that she does not want him to become a man like Paps.

Ma tells the brothers about sex and reveals she became pregnant with Manny when she was only fourteen.

Lina, Ma's supervisor, arrives with groceries during Paps's absence and kisses Ma directly on the lips.

Ma lets the phone ring for forty-five minutes before picking it up and silently hanging it back up.

After returning from his absence, Paps gives all three brothers a thorough bath together and notes the narrator has grown.

Ma hides in the bathtub with the boys when Paps comes looking; they all jump out and tackle him together.

Paps buys a truck with only one bench seat; Ma calls it a 'big-dick truck' and Paps slaps her.

The family takes a joyride in the truck at night and the boys ride in the bed shooting toy guns at the stars.

The brothers sneak out at night and fly homemade trash bag kites in an open field until very late.

Paps tracks down the brothers in the field and severely beats Manny for the unsanctioned nighttime escape.

The three brothers, now older, sit on a loading dock smoking cigarettes while the narrator reflects on growing apart from them.

The narrator's brothers confront him about his differences and he turns a corner and walks away from them into the snowy night.

The novel's most revealing scenes often unfold in the kitchen, the bathtub, and the ordinary rhythms of daily life. From Ma's unorthodox rebirth game using ketchup to her whispered plea that the narrator never become like Paps, these moments expose how tenderness and chaos are inseparable in this household. Lina's visit during Paps's absence—and the unexpected kiss she places on Ma's lips—hints at desires and escapes that will never fully materialize. When Paps returns, the family briefly reunites in the bathroom in a scene of fragile warmth before Ma hides in the tub with the boys and they ambush Paps together. The truck purchase and the subsequent nighttime joyride capture the family at its most hopeful, riding through the dark with toy guns pointed at the stars. By the time the narrator walks away from his brothers into the snow on their last night together, the family has quietly and irreversibly broken apart.

The quieter moments that reveal who this family really is.

Ma opens the car door while driving and threatens to teach the narrator to fly, forcing Paps to pull over.

The brothers encounter a pregnant woman outside a drugstore and feel her baby kick against her belly.

The hungry boys raid Old Man's garden; he calls them locusts and tells them about his youth in the Ozarks.

Old Man withdraws his offer of food and sends the boys away after Manny and Joel start fighting on his porch.

Joel and the narrator hide in the crawlspace and roleplay a phone conversation between their mother and father.

The boys slap and kick their parents without consequence, finally releasing their pent-up anger in the bathroom.

The whole family pounds rhythmically on the car together and chants all the way home after Paps's job confrontation.

Paps sits with his head in his hands at home and declares that the family will never escape their circumstances.

The family car stalls on a rainy road and the family walks the highway shoulder until a stranger gives them a ride.

The boys sit on a bridge dangling their legs above traffic and threaten a woman who pulls over to warn them.

Paps digs a mysterious trench in the backyard; Ma comes home drunk and alone and lies down in it during a rainstorm.

The narrator strips naked and lies in the trench the longest, feeling calm and wondering if Paps dug it as his grave.

Manny climbs into bed with the narrator after being beaten and says he believed God would grab the kites and save them.

The neighborhood headbanger takes the brothers to his basement and shows them a gay pornographic video on a VHS tape.

The narrator dances alone in the projected light of a Niagara Falls film at a museum while Paps watches silently from the doorway.

Beneath the surface of daily life, a series of tense moments gradually expose the emotional truths driving each family member. From Ma's terrifying car-door threat to the boys' raid on Old Man's garden and their roleplay of their parents' fractured phone calls, the family's dysfunction is restaged and rehearsed in miniature again and again. When Paps loses his job, the rhythmic car ride home becomes a brief, strange moment of collective rage, quickly followed by his defeated admission that none of them will ever escape their circumstances. The trench Paps digs in the backyard becomes a gathering point where each family member silently confronts their desire to disappear or be reborn. The headbanger's pornographic video marks the moment the narrator's brothers begin to understand something about him that he has not yet named for himself. At a museum near Niagara Falls, the narrator dances alone in a projected image of the falls—a fleeting moment of self-revelation witnessed by Paps from the doorway.