[1] The story takes place in a near-future Britain where society has broken down due to an unspecified disaster, referred to as "The Crisis."

Education exists for those who pass as the wealthier survivors, while schools for the poor act as an apparatus of the army and are designed to control the population.

The narrator, a middle-aged woman who lives a quiet life in a flat, unexpectedly ends up with 'custody' of a teenage girl named Emily Cartwright and her cat Hugo.

A few blocks away, a young man named Gerald organises dispossessed children into a new group and begins to establish a new gang.

Water is in short supply, caravans and traders are often attacked, and it is implied that even the government is starting to abandon parts of the city.

Faced with a bleak existence, the small group of Emily, Gerald, Hugo, and the Narrator fall asleep, expecting an attack from the children.

At the end of the novel, the main character's strange new family breaks through dimensional barriers via the wall and walks into a much better world.

[3] "Doris Lessing is not afraid to break through the barrier separating the mainstream from the fantastic, to let go of man's world," writes Marleen S. Barr in her essay in A Companion to Science Fiction.

She argues that feminist science fiction novels such as Memoirs of a Survivor provide an alternate viewpoint that "dissolve walls that imprison women within a sexist reality.

"[4] However, the warping of space and time presented in this novel led scholar Betsy Draine to label it a "failure", saying the shifts between realistic and mystical frames are impossible to follow.

[5] The New York Review of Books felt the ending, in which Emily leads the other main characters through the walls into another reality, was "reminiscent of a Technicolor fade-out into the sunset.

"[6] The New York Times wrote, "Lessing's message, recognizable from her previous work, is close to W. H. Auden's 'We must love one another or die'."

"[7] Consciousness becomes a physical boundary represented by the wall of the narrator's home: "the rooms and garden beyond it are areas of the unconscious which she explores.

"[8] The mystical dimension is given the author's tacit approval when she allows the principal characters to escape the dystopian reality by passing through the wall.