Throughout her writing career, Gilchrist has chronicled the exploits of her alter ego, Rhoda Manning, jumping from her imagined life as a child to adulthood. Rhoda: A Life in Stories (1995) collects all the Rhoda stories in chronological order and adds two new ones "Blue Satin" and "Drunk Every Day." The stories provide scrutiny of Rhoda's personality that peel back the admittedly autobiographical nature of these stories. Rhoda and her creator are complex and vexing, full of life that energizes the reader while becoming egocentric as she looks for that "wide band of luminous and precarious order."