The Laundress Catches her Breath features a chain-smoking, working-class Italian American woman in a depressed mill town, of her struggle to find meaningful work and the indignity of a low-paid job where she can't afford to leave home and support herself. It follows her tumultuous relationship with her father, a retired mill worker, her love for her educated uncle dying of cancer, and her escape from this soiled life through her ritual of doing laundry.