SOURCE: “Feminist Family Romances,” in The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 125-61.

In the following essay, Hirsch provides a psychoanalytic reading of the relationship between the narrator and her mother in The Lover.

“The story of my life doesn't exist,” asserts the (again) nameless narrator of The Lover. “Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line” (p. 8). The text begins with a long self-portrait, a reflection of the narrator's aged face, first as it is described to her by a young man she encounters in a public space, then as she herself sees it evolve from the age of eighteen to the present moment of utter devastation. The entire text revolves around an earlier recollection, the moment just preceding that laying to waste: the crossing of the Mekong River on a ferry at the age of fifteen and...