All That Life Can Afford

Anna Byrne, the protagonist, narrates the novel from her first-person perspective, placing her arc from insecurity to self-empowerment at the center of the story. Anna’s background, growing up in a small town in Massachusetts in a lower-middle-class home, establishes the allure that the Wilders’ elite world of wealth and luxury holds for her. Anna’s family’s financial struggles represented a defining aspect of her childhood, as their economic insecurity precluded them from getting her mom the care she needed for her Type 1 diabetes. Since her mother’s death a year before the narrative present, Anna has been desperate to escape these financial woes and remake herself, introducing the novel’s thematic exploration of Self-Reinvention Versus Authenticity.

To fit in with the Wilder family and their glamorous friends, Anna finds herself obscuring her true origins and losing sight of her authentic self. When she moves to London, England, to pursue her graduate degree in British literature after her mom’s death, Anna convinces herself that she can leave her past behind. She tutors members of London’s wealthy, elite upper class—a vocational arrangement that offers her a glimpse of this luxurious world.