The author describes the essays in this collection as "mongrols of a sort"--part personal essay and part literary commentary or criticism. The conversations range over the narratives of several generations of women writers, from Maria Paz Mendoza and Edith Tiempo to F. H. Batacan and Tara Sering; and cover conventional realist novels and short stories, as well as fairy tales, chick lit, crime fiction, and war memoirs.