Stories I Heard When I Went Home for My Grandmother's Funeral emerges from a Midwestern landscape. The women in these stories are searching for, letting go of, and recovering from love. A young girl grows up in Iowa among a family of ten kids-a family that includes a charming father who likes to drink, and a mother overwhelmed by factory work and too many children. Another young woman gets married and escapes the Midwest to live in a metropolitan Montana city. In marriage, one young woman drinks to her heart's content, divorces, quits drinking, and then discovers love again in the sunshine of a California landscape. But wait, life for these women is still not perfect. One woman journeys across country back to her Midwestern roots, possibly to find an answer to her discontent. Another finds some peace in the act of herding animals out of a suburban street. And finally, the stories come full circle, when a woman returns home to a second funeral during a cold Midwestern winter.