Greenwood’s “About The Carleton Sisters” is a debut that looks to the consequences of untended family relationships.

Dian Greenwood has “knocked on many doors” since she first started writing seriously in the early 1970s.

Her life experience has included raising sons, studying with Richard Hugo and others, running a motel in Cannon Beach, teaching at a junior college, self-publishing a book of poetry and going back to school herself in midlife to become a family therapist who continues her practice in Portland.

But Greenwood has persevered in her writing, too. And now, at 81, she is celebrating the publication of her debut novel.

“About the Carleton Sisters” is a doozy. Greenwood draws on her own many decades of lived experience, careful observation and hard-won wisdom to tell this story of a broken family that is grappling with the consequences of poor decisions made years and sometimes generations earlier.

The sisters — Lorraine, Julie and Becky — were close when young, but they’ve lived apart from one another throughout their adult lives and certainly have grown apart over those years.

This week’s book

“About the Carleton Sisters” by Dian Greenwood

She Writes Press — 312 pp — $17.95

They reunite in the small agricultural town where they grew up only when it becomes clear that Dotty, their mom, doesn’t have much longer to live.

As the eldest daughter, Lorraine has assumed most of the caregiving responsibilities as their mother’s health has declined over the years, keeping up with the mortgage payments on their double-wide trailer home by working extra shifts at the diner. Life has been hard, but she finds solace in attending the sermons delivered by the handsome pastor at her church.

Her little sister, Becky, lives across town in a different trailer park with a laissez faire husband whose willingness to put up with his wife’s addiction to alcohol is waning.

The middle sister, Julie, had been a local beauty queen before heading out of town after high school for the bright lights and a career in Las Vegas. Considered the family’s success story, she also has been a focus of her sisters’ festering resentment.

But when Julie comes back to visit Dotty on her deathbed, it looks like she has packed for a long stay. She doesn’t tell her sisters that, after 30 years as a showgirl, she is considered over the hill. Her contract has not been renewed.

Each of the sisters bears secrets and transgressions, but they share the trauma of having been abandoned by their dad when they were young, and of being raised in poverty by a mother ill-equipped to provide adequate financial or emotional support.

Now the sisters find themselves long “past the might have beens and if onlys.” Now they are dealing with the consequences of choices made and actions taken many years before.

The most important question that remains is whether their family will disintegrate after their mother’s death, or whether there’s anything left worth preserving in their sisterly relationship.

“About the Carleton Sisters” probes how fragile connections can become if left untended, and considers the work required in understanding others’ points of view. This is a quietly powerful story.