Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Exposition
In Sickness and in Health
Six-year-old David Small lives in Detroit. He doesn't exactly have a communicative family—in fact, they're experts at finding ways other than speaking to express their pain. Everybody's got their own nonverbal language, which, for his mom, dad, and brother consists of slamming things around and beating on stuff. David's way of communicating is to get sick a lot. He has sinus problems, but because it's the 1950s and he's the son of a radiologist, his dad's got a "cure": frequent X-rays of his head and neck. (Yes, doctors thought X-rays could cure stuff back then.)
Rising Action
It's Not a Tumor
By the time he's eleven, David's got a lump on his neck. Mrs. Dillon, a family friend (and, unbeknownst to David, his mom's girlfriend), notices the growth when she's over at the Smalls' house one night. She insists that David's parents take him to the doctor, by which she means a doctor who's not his dad. His mom grudgingly takes him, and the doctor says it's a sebaceous cyst that will need to be surgically removed. However, his parents don't schedule his surgery for another three years.
Climax
Say What?
Finally, far too late, David's parents take him for surgery. He thinks he's having the sebaceous cyst removed, but when he wakes up, the lump on his neck is still there; his dad tells him he's going to need another surgery, which they'll do the following morning. What they don't tell him is that he actually has thyroid cancer (which means it was, in fact, a tumor), and that along with his thyroid, they'll have to remove one of his vocal cords. When David wakes up from surgery and tries to speak, he realizes he no longer has a voice.
Falling Action
Oh Yeah, About that Cancer…
David realizes he had cancer when he finds a letter to his grandmother in his mom's desk. Angry that nobody told him, David begins acting out, which leads his parents to send him to therapy. His therapist helps him understand that his parents are deeply messed-up people, which is confirmed when his dad takes him out to dinner one night and finally admits that all those X-rays gave him cancer. Unable to deal with the dysfunction any longer, David moves out of the house at age sixteen and never goes back. He ends up becoming an art professor in New York.
Resolution
I Didn't
David's mom dies when he's thirty, and he goes back home to say goodbye to her. She no longer haunts his life, but she still haunts his dreams. One night, many years later, he dreams that he sees his mom sweeping the path to the insane asylum where his grandmother died. She motions for him to walk down the path to come inside, which is to say, turn out like the rest of the family. However, he chooses not to follow her, ending the book with the words, "I didn't."