Suburban Heathens follows the trajectory of parallel and converging catastrophes that begin with the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s and the protagonist's best friend's death, and continue with her father's struggle with heart disease, actually made worse by medical interventions witnessed by the wandering lesbian daughter who is called home to a Jewish enclave in the suburbs of Shawnee Mission, Kansas, where she grew up-halfway between the Shawnee Indian Mission and the Osawatomie State Mental Hospital. The hospital melodrama brings to light the family history of displacement and immigration, heart disease (literal and metaphoric), cancer, death, struggle, and loss as well as recovery and regeneration as Rickie Lynn Jackson finds her relatives in Rochester, New York's famous Mount Hope Cemetery.
