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Shortly after 89-year-old grandmother Allis' death in 2001, filmmaker Morgan Dews came upon a staggering archive of audio diaries, transcripts and dictaphone letters that she and the rest of her family had kept throughout the 1960s. Listening to them revealed a piece of his grandmother's life that he had never been made privy of. Integrating these eye-opening tapes with a collage of typically upbeat photographs and home movies, Dews weaves together a chilling, devastating portrait of a family whose happy-go-lucky facade masks six lives in a state of unbearable turmoil and decay. "Must Read After My Death" reminds of 2008's "Revolutionary Road" in its themes of marital strife and the struggle against conformity in a conformist era, but its emotions, all of them painfully real, run far, far deeper than anything found in that Hollywood-produced melodrama.

Allis begins her recordings after her family's move to the idyllic suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. Left alone to care for their house and children Anne, Chuck, Bruce and Douglas while husband Charley's work takes him to Australia for four months out of the year, Allis makes it clear from the start that she was not made to be a submissive homemaker. The life she once knew vanished before her eyes—she, like Charley, was married once before, and, unlike Charley, had attended college—Allis is left trapped in a situation she does not know how to get out of. She loves her kids, to be sure, and struggles to stay in contact with Charley via dictaphone whenever he is gone, but none of it seems to ever be enough for a man who drinks too much and expects those around him to bow to his whims. Gradually, the viewer learns that their marriage is an open one; Charley makes no bones about romancing women overseas, and Allis, at least once, goes on a trip to New York City with a male suitor. Conversations heard between them are so nonchalant on the matter that one hardly believes it at first.

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