Evelyn Couch, a woman caught in the slump of middle age, gains a new outlook on life when she befriends eighty-year-old Ninny Threadgoode who tells her the story of the Whistle Stop Cafe and the two women who ran it in the 1930s, best friends Idgie and Ruth.
Dena Nordstrom bounces between life in New York City as a national television newscaster and the small town of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, for answers to questions about her past, her mother and herself.