In Praise of the Stepmother consists of fourteen chapters and an Epilogue. As he did in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982), Vargas Llosa interpolates related materials into the main plot of the story. Chapters 2, 5, 7, 9, 12, and 14 contain a color print of a famous painting accompanied by a narration, each from a separate voice, associating the narrator's reading of the picture to the authoritative version of the plot provided by an omniscient and detached third person narrator who controls the more realistic aspects of the novel.

Rigoberto, Lucrecia, Alfonso, and perhaps even Justiniana, all become the protagonist/narrator of one of the paintings by Jordaenes, Boucher, Titian, Francis Bacon, Fernando de Szyszlo, and Fra Angelico. This rather heterogenous collection of prints share the fact that they could be viewed as depicting various aspects of sensuality, from the voyeuristic to the immaculate.

The remainder of the chapters relate the domestic life...