Narrator and point of view

“Your Shoes” by Michèle Roberts is a first-person narration told from the perspective of the main character, a mother whose daughter has run away from home.

As with every first-person narrator, you must reflect on the narrator’s reliability. The mother renders the events from her perspective, and there are no other characters that can contradict her or tell otherwise. The daughter is not there to defend herself and neither is the narrator’s mother, who might have had a different opinion regarding her daughter’s childhood. What is more, there are many references to madness in the story, which make readers assume that we have to deal with a narrator on the verge of going insane:

I thought I knew you as well as I know this house. No secret place...