It is Christmas Eve, 2004, and the Wyeth family is beginning to gather in Palm Springs, California. Polly and Lyman and the parents of Brooke Wyeth, who lives in New York writing for a magazine. She is coming home this holiday after six years of not seeing the family. Silda, who is Polly's sister, also makes a visit now that she is out of rehab. At one point, Polly and Silda wrote an MGM television series, but the sisters became mad at each other and stopped seeing the other because they looked at the world in a different way from one another. At one point, Brooke had a younger brother, Henry, who committed suicide, She felt that it would be a good time to once again bring up what happened.
Brooke is struggling with becoming independent from her parents, as they don't want her to return back to New York. She wants to make a memoir for her brother that died, but her parents don't want to be reminded of it. She finally decides that she is going to do it whether or not they like it, not caring if they ever speak to her again. Lyman, for the first time ever, speaks up about the truth of his son's death. He feel like he contributed to it after he slapped his son for a reason that now seemed silly. He wasn't being supportive to him an feels he led Henry to his death.
This dark secret shared, the whole family is mournful. Brooke, at the point of desperation, throws he memoir into the air and screams of her mental suffering that has went on ever since Henry's death. An epilogue shows that, after the death of Lyman and Polly, the memoir is published and Brooke wonders when she will see Henry again.
The name Other Desert Cities comes from a sign that Brooke saw when driving to California, telling of Indio, California and all of the other cities that "don't really matter."
