Marguerite Daigle is a free-spirited widow raising two daughters, Penny and Mahalia, in a bleak upstate New York town. Describing herself as a "seventh generation lapsed Louisiana Catholic" who has become "a displaced person in the middle of nowhere," Marguerite holds her family together passionately and creatively, if unconventionally. All that unravels in the summer of 1977 when Penny is eight and Mahalia is fifteen and the pressures of life as a single mother begin to weigh too heavily on Marguerite's shoulders. Her only relief comes in the form of more alcohol than is good for her—enough alcohol to make her forget her troubles as well as her responsibilities.

Penny runs wild, and Mahalia flees into the arms of strange Isabel Flood, a local babysitter and religions right-to-lifer who provides Mahalia with the structure that she has been craving. When marguerite goes away to dry out, Isabel's influence over Mahalia grows stronger than her own mother's. After Marguerite returns from cleaning up her life, she finds that her life is no longer entirely her own.

With a tension that builds from the first pages, I Loved You All is a lyrical, funny, and moving portrait of family likfe and of the peculiarly American politics of abortion rights. With her extraordinary talent for blending the political with the personal, Sharp demonstrates once again that she is a writer of formidable abilities.