45 pages • 1-hour read
All That Life Can Afford
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Character Analysis
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
Anna Byrne
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. Anna’s desperation to remake herself into a person Faye, Callum, Theo, and Tess will accept highlights her lifelong desire for belonging. Since she was a little girl, Anna has felt like an outsider. While Anna’s peers had the safety of their parents’ money, Anna had to work hard to support herself and help her mother and father. Even when she got to college, she struggled to make friends because she was always busy working to put herself through school.
These same dynamics from Anna’s past follow her overseas to London, suggesting that Anna needs to confront her past rather than running from it to build a new future. In London, she works multiple jobs (as a tutor and bartender) while attending school and still struggles to cover her basic living and travel expenses. The Wilders’ unexpected offer to travel with them to Saint-Tropez gives her a taste of a different kind of life, introducing The Seductive Power of Wealth. Her experience in Saint-Tropez reawakens her deep desire for both belonging and ease, pushing her to take any actions necessary to remain a part of this world. When she starts house sitting at the Wilders’ Highgate home, Anna begins to believe her own ruse that she’s someone different from who she is, wearing Faye’s clothes and hiding her true past.
Anna’s attempts to appear wealthy compromise her values, forcing her to confront the source of her desire for belonging. In hopes of finding acceptance, she lets her new Highgate friends believe that she’s a local, that she doesn’t work, and that she can afford the same designer clothes and expensive vacations as they can. By the novel’s end, she realizes that disguising her past can’t erase her true identity. Only by owning her background can she embrace a more authentic way of being. Anna’s journey of self-discovery defines her as a dynamic character who changes as a result of her experiences, mistakes, and relationships.
Callum
Callum, one of the novel’s primary characters, represents Anna’s first connection in elite London society outside of the Wilder family. Everett introduces Callum as one of Faye’s “friend[s] from London,” Callum often ends up in the South of France “for the holidays” like many in the Wilders’ social sphere (63). To Anna, Callum represents the divide between her world and the London elite, embodying everything that she herself desires to be. She’s immediately taken by his good looks and charm, and intrigued that Callum seems genuinely interested in her. During their first encounter over dinner, Anna revels in their easy conversation and Callum’s kindness. Something about his outlook on the world sets him apart from Faye’s other friends, despite his status as an “old money blue blood himself” (67). Anna notes that Callum “certainly looked the part. There were always shades of British class snobbery that [she] missed, as an American, but still—it was impossible to imagine any set that wouldn’t want Callum in it” (67). Anna wants to make sense of Callum’s origins because she’s already begun to buy into the idea that a person’s class is a reflection of their character and self-worth.
Across the novel, Callum and Anna’s romantic arc mirrors aspects of the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Like Darcy, Callum’s initial affability dissipates as soon as Anna reveals her low-income background and lack of social connections, giving the impression that he’s disdainful of her humble economic status. She later discovers that Callum’s frustration with her originates from his belief that she’s sacrificed her authenticity to gain acceptance in a world that doesn’t see or care about her. He feels personally compromised by her lies of omission, admitting that while his father is wealthy, he’s from humble beginnings. He likes Anna for her values and how her background has cultivated her worldview.
Like Austen’s Elizabeth and Darcy, both Callum and Anna grow as the narrative progresses, allowing them to find their way back to each other and end up in a romantic relationship by the novel’s conclusion. Anna realizes that she wants to be a person whom Callum respects, and to gain his respect, she must be herself. Callum values Anna because of her intelligence, strength, and independence, supporting and encouraging both her academic and vocational aspirations. The two ultimately learn how to cultivate a more balanced dynamic once they embrace honesty, openness, and authenticity.
Faye Wilder
Faye Wilder, a secondary character, acts as an aspiration figure for Anna as she navigates the Wilders’ elite world, possessing the things Anna herself desires—social privilege, friends, an extravagant wardrobe, and a life of abundance rather than scarcity. Anna regards Faye as a “grown-up version of Pippa. Magnetic, just as canny, just as in control” (59). However, while Anna gets along with Pippa, she fears Faye, who doesn’t like or respect Anna because she doesn’t see her as an equal, introducing the novel’s thematic engagement with Power Dynamics in Interpersonal Relationships. Faye regards Anna as hired help and uses her for her own pleasure and amusement. Although she takes Anna on outings, introduces her to her friends, and dresses her in her clothes, she doesn’t want to know or genuinely connect with Anna.
Everett positions Faye as an antagonistic force in Anna’s story. As Anna tries to reinvent herself in Faye’s image, Faye represents both her entry point to an elite circle of friends and also the greatest threat to Anna’s carefully curated facade. Anna wants Faye’s friends to think she’s Faye’s school friend instead of Faye’s sister’s tutor, knowing that Faye herself could reveal the truth at any moment. She also fears that Faye will discover that she’s borrowing her clothes from the Highgate house. Faye’s public humiliation of Anna when she catches Anna wearing one of her dresses at a party marks a turning point in Anna’s arc that forces her to reckon with her choices. Faye also convinces her parents to kick Anna out of their Highgate house, cut off contact with her, slander her in the neighborhood, and press charges against her. Her determination to sabotage Anna threatens Anna’s safety and security, raising the narrative stakes.
Theo
Theo, another of the novel’s primary characters, is a member of Anna’s new Highgate social circle and her primary love interest after they meet in Saint-Tropez. Throughout the novel, Everett defines Theo in opposition to Callum. Whereas Callum treats Anna coldly after their initial connection, Theo showers her with attention and affection. Theo is attractive, charming, and monied, but unlike Callum, Theo doesn’t seem to care that Anna is pretending to be someone she’s not. She’s even flattered when Theo helps perpetuate her ruse, introducing her as one of Faye’s friends instead of as Pippa’s tutor. She latches onto Theo because dating him feels like evidence that she belongs in his elite world. While Callum pushes Anna toward authenticity, Theo encourages and enables her self-reinvention.
Everett reveals that, like Anna, Theo is also perpetuating a ruse in addition to enabling hers. Anna eventually discovers that he’s been seeing Faye the whole time he has been seeing her. When Anna first begins dating Theo, he views her as a novelty, frequently telling her that she’s unlike other people of her class. Initially, Anna chooses to dismiss these as backhanded compliments, ignoring the implication that he views people from her background as less worthy. While she’s still clinging to her need to belong in this elite world, Anna prefers to let these remarks go because she enjoys “insulating [her]self with his attention” (107). As long as Theo accepts her, all of his friends will accept her, too.
Allowing herself to believe her own deception as well as Theo’s leads Anna to a crisis point in her arc. After her illusory performance of wealth crumbles, Anna sees both herself and Theo clearly. Anna ends her relationship with Theo after she realizes the shallow nature of his interest in her. After the Billionaires Row party, she starts to understand how little Theo cares about her as a person. He doesn’t come to her defense when Faye verbally assaults her and does nothing to clear her name with his friends. Later, when he tries to get back together with her, he insists that their relationship has to remain a secret. Theo wants to hide Anna, suggesting he’s just as ashamed of her origins as Anna has been for years. Breaking up with Theo is one step that Anna takes to reclaim her authentic self.
Andre and Liv
Andre and Liv, two of Anna’s close friends in London, represent the antithesis of her connections in the Wilders’ social circle, highlighting the divide between performative relationships and authentic friendships. Although they haven’t known each other long, Anna establishes immediate connections with both Andre and Liv. In part, Anna’s bonds with her friends are inspired by overlaps in their backgrounds. For example, Andre is “another working-class imposter like [Anna], from an East London public housing estate, but clever enough to get into University College London, one of the best universities in England” (24). He is familiar with the economic struggles Anna has grown up with, and similarly interested in establishing himself via his academic and vocational pursuits. While he and Anna are from different countries and cultural backgrounds, these divergences help them learn from one another, instead of isolating them from each other. Liv, who was “[b]orn and raised in New York,” is “the daughter of South Indian immigrants” and Anna’s “only real friend here besides Andre” (25). Like Anna, she’s “another American grad student” and carries herself with a coolness and calm that Anna admires (25).
Anna pulls away from Andre and Liv when she starts spending time with Theo and his friends, because her authentic connection to them challenges her attempts at self-deception. It’s more difficult to pretend to be someone she isn’t around people who know and accept her true self. By the novel’s end, Anna realizes that she has forsaken her authentic friendships for shallow forms of connection that have compromised her authenticity. She makes amends with Andre and Liv and ends up moving into a flat all together, providing Anna with the authentic sense of belonging that she’s long desired.
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