The first-person narrator is the protagonist of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars. She never shares her name, but the reader learns that she is the child of Chinese immigrants and a trans woman. She grows up in a depressing coastal town called Gloom with her younger sister, Charity. Her parents pin all their hopes and dreams for the future on the narrator, exerting an oppressive degree of control over her life and leading her to feel isolated. They do not accept her trans identity, and the narrator soon finds that she must escape in order to become her authentic self. She leaves Gloom for the City of Smoke and Lights, a large city where she hopes she will be free to live as she wishes. The journey turns out to be one of growth and self-discovery.

By her own admission, the narrator does not always tell the truth and considers herself an “escape artist.” She shares this self-assessment with the reader at the very beginning of the text, when she tells her sister in a letter: “I’m the liar in the family, not you” (31). This admission suggests that going forward, she will be an unreliable narrator.