The main protagonist of Building Stories is an unnamed woman with brown hair who suffered the loss of the lower half of her left leg in a childhood boating accident. She comes to inhabit the third floor of a three-story apartment building, with a couple who constantly argue on the second floor and the elderly landlady on the first. The woman sees herself as a failed artist, and the work follows her in the Chicago brownstone apartment building in her twenties. Later in life as a mother, she puts on weight and feels her creativity stifled by domesticity. She still thinks of her first boyfriend, who left her after an abortion, and feels frustrated with her husband.