"Daughter of Invention" focuses on the relationship between a daughter and her mother. The first mentions of the child's father are in passing: the girls, with our narrator as their spokesperson, ask their mother to convince their father to allow them to go places, rather than asking him directly; he doesn't want the girls to become Americans. It's not until more than two pages in that it becomes clear that he's a doctor, and while they're successful now, in Brooklyn, they're still haunted by the fear of their past lives in the Dominican Republic, where they fled from. Still, he's mostly uninvolved until the narrator is asked to speak publicly, when he becomes deeply invested in her performance.

The narrator feels uninspired for a long time and then suddenly finds her inspiration and writes a speech that makes her mother glow with pride. When she reads it to her father, however, he's outraged and forbids her to give the speech as she has written it, eventually ripping it to pieces to ensure he gets his way. The narrator's mother takes her side, and the two begin a tremendous fight.

This conflict drives the narrative because it lays bare the conflict that had been alluded to be the father's absence early in the story. The narrator says that "Ever since they had come to this country, their life together was a constant war," and this moment drives the story into a place where these conflicts can be seen and addressed.