Audition

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of pregnancy loss, elder abuse, and emotional abuse.

Throughout the novel, the narrator remains preoccupied with worries over how she is perceived by others in both public and private spaces. From the very first chapter of the novel, the narrator believes that appearances are highly prone to misinterpretation. She recalls a wholesome dinner with her father, which was suddenly upended by the lewd misinterpretation of the waiter serving them. As a result, the narrator is always conscious about the way she performs her identity, hoping that eventually, she can act in a way that allows the performed version of herself to overlap entirely with her real self.

The narrator’s tendency to see every real-world interaction as a performance resonates with the pressures of her acting career. In Chapter 5, for example, she discusses her acting philosophy, which requires her to immerse herself into the fictional reality of the role that she is playing. In a creative process that mirrors method acting, the narrator must embrace the character’s reality as her own, then willfully try to find the limits of that reality before she returns to her own. This cycle is meant to affirm the narrator’s control over her choices, especially since she fears the inability to exert any agency or to experience the perception of others while she is in this unique psychological space.