Older Men is set for the most part in and around New York City. Elise lives and goes to school in the Connecticut suburbs of New York. Her father works at a hospital in New York City. The story begins with Elise and her father shopping in New York. She spends part of the summer with her maternal grandmother in New York City and several weekends with her grandmother's boyfriend, Vernon, who has a house on Long Island right near the Long Island Sound. While she stays with her grandmother, she gets a job at a feminist bookstore in Greenwich Village. During the course of the novel, Elise makes several trips to White Plains, New York, a suburb of New York City, to visit her mother, who is hospitalized there.

During August, Elise and her father travel to Maine to stay where they have been going, along with...