Sonja Yoerg has said that the settings for her books are as important as their main characters. Her debut novel, House Broken (2015), is set in San Francisco, where she lived at the time, while her more recent All the Best People (2017) takes place in her native state of Vermont. Yoerg's fiction sheds light on familial struggles usually kept behind closed doors: mental illness, drug addiction, estranged siblings, and more. She studied behavior long before she became a novelist, except it was with animals, and published a well-regarded nonfiction text called Clever as a Fox: Animal Intelligence (2001).