The story is told in a first-person confessional narrative. Presented as an "interior monologue" or an "imagined dialogue," the work incorporates autobiographical elements from Olsen's early adulthood to her middle-age.[5][6][7]
The narrator is a working-class woman in her early forties who has four children, all daughters. At 19-year-of-age she had given birth to her first child, after which her husband abandoned them, coinciding with the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s.[8]
Her narrative concentrates on recollections of raising Emily under these difficult circumstances. The hardships the young single mother endured to find work necessitated frequent absences from her daughter during her infancy and throughout her childhood. Emily was sent to her father's relatives for extended periods, as well as to a country convalescent home for children of indigent parents. These episodes are painful to the mother and particularly the daughter. The mother fervently hopes that her daughter, now an adult, will surmount her difficult childhood and achieve a measure of happiness.[9][10][11]