In ''A War of One's Own''
, the reader is narrated the coming-of-age of the main character Lin Duomi. Considering the early death of her father and the busy work life of her mother, Duomi is isolated from her parents from a young age. The remarriage of her mother doesn't affect her emotionally either. Duomi's early sexual awakening makes her realize the fascination and attraction she finds in both her own body and those of her own sex. The heavily mixed emotions she feels about her sexuality persist into adulthood. At age nineteen, Duomi begins her career as a writer and leaves her hometown to pursue work at a film production unit. She takes a college entrance exam and succeeds in going to a prestigious university. After her studies, she eventually decides to go back to working in the film production unit. At age twenty-four, Duomi falls in love for the first time. At thirty years old, Duomi moves to
Beijing and meets her second lover, but eventually settled for a loveless marriage with an older man. In the novel's final scene, a now-grown Duomi masturbates by herself while gazing into a mirror, directly paralleling the first scene of the novel.
Autobiographical elements ''A War of One's Own'' is heavily
autobiographical and intentionally so. Not only do Lin Bai and the main character Duomi share the same family name, but Duomi, is also originally from
Beiliu,
Guangxi. Lin Bai's father also died at the age of three, and she also started writing and publishing her first poems at the age of nineteen. The novel's narrator oscillates between the first person to the third person, creating a metafictional literary effect where the "I" of the narrator and novel's author, and Duomi, the main character, become interchangeable. == Reception and cultural impact ==