The story of the Grieves sisters is related from two degrees of remove: It is a story that the narrator’s mother tells the narrator, which the narrator then tells the reader. This distance between the narrator and the events of the story she recounts symbolizes the narrator’s lack of access to her deceased mother and emphasizes how the narrator attempts to understand her mother better through indirect means.

The mother boarded with the Grieves sisters when she was a young woman, yet they remain mysterious to her in many ways. She learns from the townspeople, rather than from the sisters themselves, about the scandal of Ellie’s pregnancy and Flora and Robert’s broken engagement. She never learns the origins of Ellie’s illness or Flora’s true feelings about her role as spinster and caretaker. Similarly, the narrator’s mother remains mysterious to the narrator; she attempts to understand her mother better through the telling of this story, just as her mother told the story to try to better understand the Grieves sisters.

Munro creates a metafictional aspect to the story by portraying her narrator as a fiction writer. The narrator is aware of how she actively shapes the story over the course of its telling, and the reader is aware of the artifice of the story and the motivations of the person telling it.