Before We Were Yours
Before We Were Yours
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Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and child abuse.
The Effects of Memory on Relationships
Memory is a potent force in the book. The loss of memory is a fixation at the beginning, especially for Avery, who mourns Grandma Judy’s failing memory and worries that without her memories, their relationship will deteriorate. However, the interplay between memory and relationships turns out to be less straightforward than this. While memory can bring people together, it can also cause them to drift apart.
The impact of memory is clearest in May/Rill’s storyline. Memory is vital to May—the memory of her life as Rill and of each of her siblings, including those she never saw again. In her old age and in the nursing home, she is surrounded by photos that connect her to the long-ago life of Rill on the Arcadia. The dragonfly bracelets too are talismans of memory. Likewise, in her moments of most acute pain in the Tennessee Children’s Society Home, Rill relies on the power of memory to keep her going, such as the memory of her father’s songs or her mother’s prayers in Polish. Memory allows these relationships to live on in a way that gives Rill/May strength, but it also does something else when May happens to meet Avery. May immediately sees the family resemblance, which eventually allows May to reconnect with her sister and discover a new family tie in Avery herself. May’s memories therefore reunite her with her family in a way that is ultimately more than symbolic.
By contrast, some memories are so powerful that they overwhelm the individual, distancing them from those around them. This is the case with Grandma Judy, who Avery finds is constantly adrift between past and present, between concealed memories and the past she lived in the open as part of her public persona. Grandma Judy shares some memories with Avery, those she can recall or those she lets slip when dementia takes over and she forgets who she is speaking with. However, to keep her moored to reality and to her family in the present day, Avery finds that she must uncover other memories, especially about Judy’s sisters and her birth parents, and offer them to her as a way to bridge the gap between past and present. This suggests that if memory can strengthen or preserve relationships, the reverse is also true; relationships can preserve memory.
Identity and the Search for the Self
A search for identity permeates the book. At the most basic level, one of the two major storylines centers on Avery’s quest to learn about her family heritage. However, this search for answers has broader implications in a novel where identity is repeatedly shown to be malleable. In one way or another, most of the novel’s major characters are preoccupied with determining who they are independent of the roles imposed on them.
It is no accident that Avery, who knows herself the least, has the most defined sense of family identity. Her family’s conspicuous role in the community forces her to assume an identity and to always look and act the part of the senator’s daughter and high-profile attorney. The Stafford name compels her to be a certain kind of person, one who is refined and reflects traditional Southern etiquette. It dictates where she should be and even whom she should love. Uncovering her relationship to the Fosses is not simply about recognizing a previously unknown family connection. Rather, the fact that Avery’s ancestry is so far removed from the high society that has shaped her life compels her to reassess who she actually wants to be as an individual: a Stafford or a Foss.
Other characters have a deeper sense of who they are at heart, although circumstances sometimes force them to adopt different personas to survive. Grandma Judy has lived a life with a certain outward image that corresponds to her social class and station. At the same time, however, she maintains the identity she never got to fully grow into, that of the river daughter who spends her time out on the water with her siblings. Being in the sisters’ little hideaway cottage allows her to develop that identity. Likewise, May and Rill both exist as realized identities in the book even though they are two halves of one person. These examples suggest that while identity may be partly determined by others (as in Miss Tann renaming the children), an identity that is lost or suppressed does not disappear and can be reclaimed, as seen in Avery pursuing a relationship with Trent and the case of Arney, who is literally unbound from the identity constraints put on her by her father and becomes her true self.
The Strength of Familial Bonds
Family is essential in the book, but it is not straightforward. Like identity more broadly, family means different things at different times and to different characters. What never changes, however, is the ability of family to endure across hardship, distance, and time.
The durability of family bonds becomes evident once the Foss children are stolen from their parents. The bonds between the siblings become the new paramount familial bond, and the bond stays essential until the end of the book, when May and Grandma Judy sit side by side reminiscing about the old days. This durability does not prevent the siblings from being separated, including by death (as in the case of Camellia). Nevertheless, the fact that the novel ends with the reunion of two of the sisters implies that the relationships themselves persist despite efforts to suppress them. The emphasis on shared physical appearance symbolically underscores this point; Avery does not even know of her connection to the Fosses, but her looks alone spark May’s recognition and involve her in the family’s story. Inherited features thus become a testament to the bonds that the orphanage tried to erase.
At the same time, the novel suggests that family does not require a blood relationship. This is the case with some of the children in the home whom Rill begins keeping an eye out for, especially the younger ones like Stevie. Arney becomes like family, and Rill offers to be “her people” if Arney joins them. After Briny’s death, Rill realizes that family isn’t based on heritage or class status; it is also defined by love, even love between virtual strangers or people of different social stations. When the Seviers welcome Fern and Rill back after they run away, Rill understands that the Seviers are family to her after all. In this context, her choice to continue to use the name they know her by is not simply a matter of practicality but an acknowledgement that chosen family, too, persists across time.
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