An unemployed husband, two daughters, a job as a night cleaner in the university and only twenty-three years old. In this joyless life the only thing that approaches pleasure for Ann is her passion for audiocassettes of soap operas.

Problems are heightened by the fact that they are still living in a trailer on land owned by her mother, whose relationship with Ann is tainted by a bitterness born out of the fact that her father is serving a ten-year prison sentence.

This monotonous world is shattered when she is told that she has less than a handful of months left to live. Deciding not to tell her family about this for fear of spending her remaining days being surrounded by the gloom of her own approaching demise, she instead makes a list of what she wants to do before she departs this world. Through these things, she soon begins to discover how to live a life she had no choice but to abandon when she took on the role of mother/bread-winner.  

In many a director's hands, the intimate study of a lone human life would be fodder for a depressing tear-jerker, instead Coixet has turned her script into an unsentimental, genuinely moving tribute to the commonplace chances to celebrate life.