Cordelia is the "greatest unpublished novelist of her generation," who has found, at the height of her noncareer, that she is dying of lung cancer. After leaving New York, she returns home to Equality, Alabama, because she is the seventh Cordelia in her matrilineal line who has been born or died in Equality, and Cordelia will not buck tradition. Tradition and memory are all that hold together the people in this small, dying town, and they are the only thing Cordelia has left. Death in Equality is Cordelia's story, narrated by herself - during the increasingly short intervals when she is conscious - and by her unconscious voice, her id, her narrative voice, when she is unconscious. Together, the two aspects of Cordelia relate the stories that have made up her life, as well as the stories that will go untold, unrecorded, and unread when she dies.