With a century of Southern storytelling dying with Ruth Weaver, a victim of Alzheimer's, David Joy races to collect her Depression-era tales of Paw Creek, North Carolina. Yet more than mere memories, Joy discovers a doctrine that challenges his views on the human experience and defines his beliefs on life, death, and the immortality of story. Centered on the past century of a Southern family, Ruth: A Beautiful Dismantling examines a woman's 90-year life from a Depression-era cotton farm to a modern Southern city eventually attempting to conceptualize "story" as the unifying string of human experience: "When the days grow shallow, all we have are the memories, the stories that remain scattered like seed, the tales that bind us in this world. We can retell them, gather the remnants of souls that have exploded into the infinite, piece the shattered bits back to form, and breathe life into the ones we've loved and lost. As we stare into the oblivion and slowly fade from the familiar, those stories will be the faces that surround us and the voices we hear when we too come to pass. We all become tales.".