Eileen Dunlop, a twenty-four-year-old secretary living in X-ville, is the novel’s protagonist. Eileen is depressed and dissatisfied with her life in X-ville, caring for her father through his alcohol addiction, and working at X-ville's juvenile penitentiary, Moorehead. She frequently fantasizes about running away to New York City to start her life over. She is disconnected from her sister, Joanie, and has no friends in X-ville. Though Eileen is depressed, envious of other women, extremely lonely, and imagines herself being impaled on the icicles that line her home’s doorway (9), she is resolved to live and change her life. She calls herself a “fabulous shoplifter” (24).

Eileen obsesses about her appearance. She finds her own body repulsive, has no interest in sex, and restricts her eating in order to fulfill society’s beauty standards. After her mother’s death, Eileen wears her mother’s clothes to make her body appear smaller.

Eileen is the name that the narrator gives to her twenty-four-year-old self; the reader never learns the narrator’s true name, nor the name of the New England town called X-ville. The narrator is unreliable as she describes the events of the novel fifty years into the future.