It is a first-person narrative of a fictionalized version of the author, of her life as a teen mom and budding feminist, from the birth of her daughter when she was 18 years old, to her graduation from Mills College.

The story begins when Gore gives birth to her daughter at the age of 18, in rural Italy, and is subjected to obstetric violence, and closes after her graduation from Mills College.

"[2] In her Lambda Literary review, Daphne Sidor notes both the conflict between patriarchal oppression and feminine self-determination, highlighting this passage from the book: "The voices of the men on the AM radio ranted fast about welfare queens and unfit mothers and all the ways our children would suffer, and the scarlet letter of my bad decisions seared itself into my skin like a brand, reminding me to feel dirty and afraid even when I’d woken up content, my breasts swelling with sustenance," while also acknowledging that Gore successfully addresses the internal conflicts and dualities faced by her protagonist.

Then I rode and read a little further, pausing to glance up at the station names and at the several young mothers who shared my car, in love with their babies, immersed in their thoughts.

"[3] In CraftLiterary, Melissa Benton Barker calls the We Were Witches a "feminist novel and anti-shame manifesto, [that] offers a blueprint of writing craft as both a radical disruption of the patriarchy and a powerful healing tool for those who live outside the patriarchy’s prescribed norms," noting that it is written outside the traditional narrative arc of Freytag’s pyramid, and is classified as a novel "because it straddles the narrowing space between memoir and fiction".