She demonstrated that reverence when her mother, also named Dorothea, died in 1993, leaving behind the beloved family house, called Vagabond Villa. While her sister and three brothers wanted to sell it, Ms. Frank did not. She could not see others living in what had been her last enduring connection to her youth.

Her plan was to buy out her siblings with money borrowed from her husband, Peter Frank. He refused her request, insisting that he did not wish to spend the rest of his life on the house’s porch listening to her family tell the same stories over and over.

“I said, ‘O.K. Well, I’ve got news for you, Bubba,’” she recalled her angry response when she was interviewed by The New York Times in 2008. “‘I’m going to write a book and I’m going to sell a million copies and I’m going to buy Momma’s house back. And you can’t come in.’”

His response: “Let’s see you do it.”

She took on the writing challenge with just a little bit of experience. She had attended a creative writing course at Bloomfield College in New Jersey and studied enough romance novels to believe she could write just as well.

“She was just brewing to be an author,” Ms. Peluso said. “Events just put that in motion.”

With the publication in 1999 of “Sullivan’s Island: A Lowcountry Tale,” Ms. Frank made good on her dare: It sold more than one million copies, earning her more than enough to buy her mother’s house. But it had already been sold, and she and her husband bought another one on the island instead.