Memory and the Past

The novel’s epistolary form enacts the author’s overarching explorations of memory and the past. Each section of the novel presents a letter between the two first person narrators, Patricia and Rainey. Throughout their written correspondences, the characters return to the scenes, experiences, and emotions of their past. In writing to one another, therefore, they are each attempting to relay the specific texture and atmosphere of what they experienced throughout their lives. At the start of Part I, for example, Patricia writes to Rainey, “You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives” (3). Over the course of the pages that follow, she attempts to capture what it was like to be a young American woman living in Saigon during the Vietnam War. As the section unfolds, Patricia struggles to recall the exact nature of what...