The nine stories of A Complicated Situation chart the complexities of human relationships and the ironies engendered by the ambivalences of the heart: A young girl's father has died, obliging her mother to take in a series of boarders, the last of whom, one with a damaging secret, inadvertently drives a wedge between mother and daughter.

An elderly man leaves the large midwestern house in which he has raised his family for a small room in his daughter's apartment in Los Angeles, but finds within himself a number of spacious rooms sufficient for a lifetime's wandering. A brother reluctantly takes his grieving sister into his London flat after their parents' deaths and realizes, as he watches her try to adjust, that he is the one in need.

After several years of living with her widowed stepfather in northern California, an adolescent girl tries to articulate her affection for him only as she is being sent back East to live with relatives she hardly knows.