All That Life Can Afford
45 pages • 1-hour read
Emily EverettAll That Life Can Afford
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Prologue-Chapter 11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
Prologue Summary
On New Year’s Eve in France, 22-year-old Anna Byrne looks out over the Mediterranean and watches the fireworks show in awe. She lets her worry melt away.
Chapter 1 Summary: “London, October 2009”
Since arriving in London, Anna has been working as a private school tutor. She recently moved to the city, where she’s earning her master’s degree in British literature at Queen Mary University. Raised in a lower-middle-class home, Anna works hard to pay her bills. She has been supplementing her bartending gig at Garage with weekly SAT-prep tutoring courses. She got the position through the agency, Kramer Test Prep. However, it’s sometimes difficult for Anna to afford the train fare to the sessions. On the train to Brighton one day, she’s forced to charm the conductor so she doesn’t have to pay for her ticket. It works, but she can’t help feeling like a failure. She tells herself that next week will be better.
Chapter 2 Summary
On the train home, Anna’s mind drifts back to her childhood. She had a difficult home life but was close with her mother. However, her mom had had diabetes for years. Because they couldn’t afford her bills, she often skimped on insulin. She died a year ago.
Anna remembers how close she and her mom were. They’d visit the library together, reading books about England. As a child, England always seemed like a fairy tale to Anna. Her mom assured her that someday she’d make it there.
Anna is proud of herself for finally getting to England. However, because money is so tight, London doesn’t always feel like the fantasy Anna imagined. When she isn’t working or attending class, she spends most of her time watching the reality show Chelsea Made with her roommate, Andre. At her students’ homes, Anna will sometimes imagine what it’d be like to have a different life. She also wonders what her mom would think of this world.
Chapter 3 Summary
Anna reports to class. She likes her professors but feels out of place amongst her peers. They’re all from Britain, or from Commonwealth countries,” whereas Anna is from Massachusetts. (19). Her mind wanders, and she realizes how out of place she’s felt since middle school. She didn’t fit in at Smith College either, but she did discover her passion for books and publishing while there. She tells herself that she’ll eventually adjust to her new life.
Chapter 4 Summary
On Saturday, after Anna finishes tutoring, she, Andre, and their friend Liv walk to Hampstead Heath. Andre and Liv are also students with similar backgrounds to Anna. Anna loves sitting on Parliament Hill with them, chatting, and eating baklava. Today, Anna opens up about her money troubles. Her friends suggest she ask her dad for help, but he and Anna had a falling out around the time of her mom’s death. After her mother died, Anna was desperate to get away. She applied to Queen Mary and left the States, leaving her dad behind. Looking out over the city now, Anna resolves not to let her money troubles ruin London for her anymore.
Chapter 5 Summary
Anna gets a last-minute call from Kramer asking her to take on a new student named Pippa Wilder. Anna agrees and reports to the Savoy—the fancy hotel where Pippa is staying. Sixteen-year-old Pippa invites Anna in. They chat about the SAT and get to work. During a break, they order decadent fruit platters and chat. Pippa informs Anna that her family used to live full-time in London but now spends most of their time in France. She also shares her dreams of moving to New York. Anna marvels at Pippa’s life but appreciates her candor and feels grateful to be her new tutor.
Chapter 6 Summary
Over the following weeks, Anna tutors Pippa regularly. At the end of their allotted 30 hours, Pippa panics that she’s still unprepared for the SAT. She begs her mother for more time with Anna. Anna doesn’t think Kramer would want her to take private students, but Mrs. Wilder insists. She invites Anna to stay with her family in the South of France for the holidays, during which time, she and Pippa can continue working together. Flattered, Anna promises to consider.
Chapter 7 Summary
Anna tells Liv about the Wilders’ offer. She insists that the opportunity is a good one, urging Anna to accept. Anna guesses that spending the holidays in Saint-Tropez might be fun after all.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Saint-Tropez, France, December 2009”
Anna arrives at the Wilders’ home in Saint-Tropez. She and Pippa chat about Pippa’s older sister, 21-year-old Faye, with whom Pippa doesn’t always get along. Then Mrs. Wilder gives Anna a tour and shows her to her suite. Anna marvels at the view, feeling as if she’s in a Fitzgerald novel.
In the morning, Anna meets Faye for the first time. She is pretty and poised, but Anna fears she doesn’t like her. She wonders if they’ll have trouble getting along.
Chapter 9 Summary
Anna goes out to dinner with Faye and Pippa at a fancy restaurant. Not long into the meal, Faye’s friend Callum shows up and joins them. Anna immediately notices his good looks and affable personality. Although he’s studying law, he seems genuinely interested in her literary pursuits. They banter easily, and Callum even helps Anna eat an unfamiliar oyster with grace.
Chapter 10 Summary
Liv emails Anna, desperate for details about her trip. Consumed with life in France, Anna doesn’t respond right away. On Saturday, she runs into Callum while out shopping for Christmas gifts. He shows her a shop she likes and helps her pick out gifts for Andre and Liv. When Callum asks if she’s buying things for her parents, Anna reveals that her mom died, and she doesn’t talk to her dad. He is understanding. At the checkout, Anna makes the impulsive decision to buy an expensive scarf.
Chapter 11 Summary
Before the Wilders’ holiday party, Anna accompanies Faye on a drive to “her favorite rosé vineyard in the countryside” (81). Once there, they run into Callum driving a fancy sports car. He accompanies them to the vineyard, and they leave at the same time. However, Callum’s car breaks down on the way home. Faye insists she can’t stay and help lest she miss her parents’ party. Anna insists on waiting with Callum.
After Faye leaves, Callum admits that the car belongs to a family friend. Anna helps him diagnose the car’s problem. He’s surprised at her street smarts. While they remedy the coolant issue, they discuss Anna’s challenging upbringing and her dad’s disapproval of her academic path. Anna tries expressing her love for British literature, despite her degree’s impracticality. Finally, Callum admits that he’s seen her on Parliament Hill before. He appreciated how engrossed she was in the view. Anna feels strange about his admission but decides to let it go.
Prologue-Chapter 11 Analysis
The opening chapters of All That Life Can Afford establish the primary conflicts, stakes, and themes of the protagonist Anna Byrne’s first-person account. Everett highlights the disconnect between Anna’s dreams of traveling abroad and pursuing a degree in British literature and the reality of the challenges she faces to establish the stakes of her arc. Although she’s made it to London to study, Anna needs to work multiple jobs to support herself and struggles to make ends meet. The glamorous London life she imagined for herself as a child still feels out of reach. Anna longs for a life that isn’t limited by money because of the economic struggles her family faced throughout her childhood. As the novel opens, Anna seeks to establish herself in her new home abroad and realize her freedom and autonomy.
Anna’s involvement with the Wilder family introduces the novel’s thematic exploration of Self-Reinvention Versus Authenticity. Because Anna tutors wealthy teenagers around London, she often finds it hard “to feel bad for [kids] whose weekly allowance [is] probably more than [her] family’s monthly income” (17). Taking the job with Pippa Wilder—the story’s inciting incident—shifts her perspective, offering her the opportunity to step inside the world of the wealthy London elite. Pippa’s candor, earnestness, and genuine appreciation offer Anna a sense of belonging in this world of opulence that she had previously only envied from a distance. To Anna, the Wilders’ invitation to spend the holidays with them in France symbolizes their acceptance of her. Believing that the Wilders like and value her allows Anna to dream that she can adapt her personality and obscure her past to fit into their world, hinting at the degree to which Anna will need to change herself to hold onto their fragile acceptance.
Anna’s personal history directly informs her desire to reinvent herself. The Wilders represent every Anna has never had—financial stability, an opulent lifestyle, social power, and the adoration of influential friends. Ever since Anna was a child, she’s felt like an outsider. In middle school and high school, she was surrounded by “upper-crust kids” who lived on “their parents’ money” while she worked service jobs (20). In university, she didn’t make close friends and felt as if Smith College “might as well have been a foreign country for how well [she] belonged there” (21). When she arrives in London, she’s “in love with the city but not with [her] place in it” (20). The alienation and overwhelming inadequacy that have always plagued Anna catalyze her need to reinvent herself through deceptive means if necessary.
Anna’s obsession with the Wilders and their world emphasizes The Seductive Power of Wealth as a central theme in the novel. Their life exemplifies Anna’s childhood fantasies—they own multiple houses in multiple countries, can afford to spend months at expensive hotels, eat at exclusive restaurants, and throw glamorous parties. The rarified facets of extreme wealth hold a seductive appeal for Anna because they contrast so sharply with her own upbringing, making her feel as if “the very air here [is] different, and that [she is] different in it. A world away from [her] old life and [her] old family” (56). Everett uses Anna’s lifelong love of literature to underscore the pull Anna feels toward the Wilders’ way of life. For example, when Anna sees the Saint-Tropez house, it represents “[a] shift from fiction to reality: all the evidence around [her] that the things [she’d] read about in a lifetime of library books were real—Gatsby parties, villas, chefs, green olive trees, and blue sea” (56). In accepting Wilders’ invitation, Anna believes that she can finally find a way to break free of her difficult past—a childhood defined by her mother’s illness and her father’s financial woes.
The details of Anna’s background act as literary allusions to her favorite 19th and 20th-century novels. Not unlike many of Jane Austen’s heroines, Anna feels limited by her class station. In contrast, Callum is steeped in the high-class world Anna covets, giving him freedoms to which Anna aspires. This social and financial inequity creates the central tension of their romantic arc, introducing Everett’s thematic engagement with Power Dynamics in Interpersonal Relationships. While Anna genuinely enjoys Callum’s company, Callum also represents a romantic throughway into the elite class. Their burgeoning relationship parallels the relationships between Austen’s economically disadvantaged heroines and their wealthy beaus. These dynamics launch a subtextual exploration of class inequality in the 21st century. Via Anna’s foray into the Wilders and Callum’s world, Everett explores whether the socioeconomic imbalances that defined the fictional worlds of 19th- and 20th-century literature still exist in contemporary society.
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