Her father George, played by William Hurt, is Kate's seeming antithesis - a brilliant, charming, hypercritical professor of literature who lives a passionate life of the mind while remaining cut-off from his loved ones. Her vibrant, tolerant, hypermaternal mother Kate, played by Meryl Streep, is a truly happy homemaker who would just as soon knit or upholster as talk politics or literature. Ellen, of course, loves her parents - she just can't fathom them. While in Langhorne, Ellen hopes to continue her probing story on a troubled senator with whom she attended Harvard, but little does she know the most important investigation of her life is about to take place in the family home.Īt first, Ellen is thrown right back into childhood, her every action nothing more than a rebellious reaction to her parents' divergent personalities. Returning to leaf-strewn Langhorne disgruntled and discombobulated, Ellen finds herself living once again with her middle-aged parents. She gives up her demanding New York job and leaves behind her difficult boyfriend, sacrificing her very identity.

In the midst of a family emergency, Ellen takes a sabbatical lasting from fall's first blush through the stormy winter holidays. Her single-minded drive is career - until news from home shatters her focus. Renee Zellweger is Ellen Gulden, a young investigative journalist who lives on a heady mixture of ambition, perfectionism and caffeine. Based on Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen's novel, One True Thing. Universal Pictures' One True Thing is the funny, tender and ultimately uplifting tale of a woman forced to enter her mother's and father's private world-only to find everything she thought she knew about her family, her past and even life itself about to be challenged. But it also becomes an unexpected battle for reconciliation and redemption - a search not only for the secret truth of her parents' lives but for the purpose of her own. For ambitious New Yorker Ellen Gulden, the journey back to her quaint hometown in the midst of a crisis is all of those things.

Few moments in life are as powerful, emotionally charged or rife with humor as returning home to visit your parents as an adult.

One true thing novel