Building Stories by Chris Ware is not able to be summarized in a traditional way but must be described in context. To being with the "book" is a box set of various manuscripts. There are 14 pieces total, ranging from posters to a children's book to comic books. Readers are invited to examine all of the manuscripts and to piece them together. Because of the unusual structure of the content, it may be understood after being read in any order so long as all the pieces are present. With all this in mind, here's the story. . .
A struggling young female artist moves into a new apartment in Chicago. She is never named. As a child, she lost her left leg in a freak boating accident, so her abilities are significantly hampered now. She moves into the third floor of the building. Below her, the second-floor apartment is occupied by a couple which loudly argues all the time. They receive their own subplot with a comic dedicated to how they met as well as some visual pieces depicting their relationship. In fact the story "Touch Sensitive" is about a futuristic world where people use these special helmets to study the unconscious energy of the apartment and thus determine why this couple will potentially break up. The couple's significance to these people is never explained. They are also unnamed. Then, on the first floor there is an ancient wizened land lady who generally likes to involve herself in other people's business. She too is featured in one of the comic books.
As our protagonist tries to sell her artwork, she becomes increasingly discouraged. She considers herself a failure for ending up so lonely and poor. When she was an adolescent, she had gotten pregnant with her first boyfriend and aborted the baby. This haunts the woman for years, and she never really does clear her conscious of the matter. When she meets another striking man, she starts dating him and eventually marries him. All the while there's a little voice in the back of her head warning her to avoid motherhood, but she gets pregnant anyway.
Although she loves her daughter, the woman doesn't feel like a competent mother. Never gaining a satisfactory level of success for her artwork, she grows bitter the older she gets. She resents the domestic demands of motherhood and begins to gain weight. When they have their daughter, the woman and her husband move to suburbia in Oak Park, Illinois in order to have more space. Removed from the bustling intellectual environment of the city, the woman becomes depressed. She does, however, truly love her daughter. One of the books she reads the girl is included in the box set. It's called "Branford the Benevolent Bacterium." Whether the woman wrote it or not, oddly enough, it continues to relate the story of live events which she experienced while living in the Chicago apartment in the early 2000s.
