My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry Summary | GradeSaver (2024)

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is a story about a young girl named Elsa as she grows up and the discovers the truth of the lives of the people around her. It begins in Elsa’s grandmother’s apartment as they enjoy spending time together. Elsa’s home situation isn’t very comfortable, and she has learnt to spend a lot of time alone or with her one friend – her Grandma – as her parent’s divorce goes through.

Grandma tells Elsa many stories from a fairy-tale land called the Land- of-Almost-Awake, that she learns to apply into her life once she realizes that the stories are real events that happened in Grandma’s life with a slight twist. One day, as Grandma is in the hospital, she dies a quiet and quick death from old age. Elsa is left alone and struggles to fend for herself without any friends as she goes to school and tries speaking her truth and sticking up for herself for the first time.

Elsa has to give letters to people from Grandma, as that was what she wanted her to do. She has to give them to people she was scared of and even disliked. Reading the letters and giving them to the strangers, she realizes that the people around her all have hard stories and reasons behind why they act the way they do. The scary man was a war veteran that didn’t know what to do with the horrible deaths he experienced at war, their quarreling sad neighbor a widow that lost both her son and her husband.

Learning about the people around her and how her grandmother helped them, Elsa’s eyes are opened to knowing that appearances are not always legitimate. She leans to deal with her parent’s divorce and gets friends from school, and the bullying she used to go through stops. She then learns to take responsibility for herself as she receiving Granny’s house.