Stephanie Roberts Your Shoes

The novel ”Your shoes” by Michele Roberts is a story about a mother who is “writing” a letter to her daughter. The story is somewhat about how parents and children communicate, or fail to do so. Roberts is acknowledging that a lot of parents believe that material gifts can take the place of emotional support, and that displays itself in the form of the mother.
The narrator of the story is the mother. The mother is in the daughter’s room and she is having an inner dialogue. Roberts has chosen to give the story a first-person narrator so that the reader experiences the emotions that the mother has. The first person view also makes the mother more trustworthy, which affects our view of the story. The narrator is limited to her own point of view. But she does comment on the daughter’s behavior and what she has said.
The mother is probably about 40 years old so she wouldn’t understand how the daughter feels and why she has done the things that she has done. Even though the mother tries to be like a friend to the daughter by buying her shoes and giving her all the things her own mother didn’t give her. But then again the mother ignores the emotional needs of the daughter. She gives the daughter whatever she believes that she wants and whatever the mother would have

The narrator talks as if she is angry with her own mother. She says that she preferred her fathers company. The narrator calls her mother a “A plump woman with a loud jolly laugh” she then continues describe her as “Fat, let’s be honest. Terribly vulgar, always saying the wrong thing then laughing.” Apparently, the narrator has a kind of hate to her mother and that hate becomes an insecurity when the narrator realizes that her mother loves the granddaughter more than she loves her own daughter. The narrator obviously disapproves of her own mother. She neglects her mother with a pride in learning and in a close relationship with her