The present timeline of the novel deals with the aftermath of Beth’s murder and the March family’s efforts to cope with their loss as part of a community and under the spotlight of public scrutiny. While the metafictional premise of Little Women poses a thematic question about whom stories belong to, Beth’s death poses the related question of whom grief belongs to. Bernet juxtaposes the March sisters’ interior experiences of grief with the actions of the people around them to explore how the idea of grief ownership creates tension and influences healing.

The novel explores several personal dimensions of grief, including guilt, coping mechanisms, visceral pain, and an altered sense of reality and identity. Meg feels that she’s failed in her duty to watch out for her sisters. Amy is sickened by the thought of enjoying Europe and living her dream now that Beth won’t get to live her own. Jo assigns blame as a way to cope with grief, “churning out theories” about Beth’s killer and investigating them to distract herself from her pain (124). Amy copes with alcohol, while Meg pours herself into taking care of the family. Sometimes, grief makes it hard for them to breathe, while at other times, it feels like “a knife to the stomach” or burning in their chest (79). Jo feels out of place at home, noting, “The house doesn’t look right, like someone moved everything around” (37). The remark illustrates how grief disrupts her sense of connection to the world around her. Meg describes a different form of alienation as she cries with her sisters: “It hurts. It hurts so much that I feel like I’m changing, losing sight of the person I was yesterday” (113). Losing her sister feels like losing part of herself. The sisters’ grief revolves around their interiority—their thoughts, emotions, bodily reactions, and the unspoken connections tying their choices and actions to grief.

This emphasis on the subjective experience of grief contrasts with its public performance, an example of which takes place the day after Beth dies. Florence and Aunt Mary bring a casserole to the Marches’ home, where everyone cries and says comforting, cliché things, like, “She’s in a better place” (134). Amy notes that despite this, she and Florence “haven’t talked for real” (134). The subtext of her comment qualifies such rituals and platitudes. They are the expected social behaviors following a death; they may be inspired by a sincere desire to offer love and support, and their ritualized nature reduces stress and friction, but it also makes them inherently performative and hollow.

To Jo, the candlelight vigil is the ultimate performance. It’s arranged without input from Beth’s family, and the crowd is full of people who didn’t know Beth, leading Jo to assume that they only attended for the drama. This equates grief to a form of entertainment, paralleling the idea of exploiting trauma for narrative “content.” Jo compares the vigil attendees to people who post about Beth on social media, seeing both groups as more concerned with attention and playing the part of someone grieving because it engenders sympathy. A particular description Jo offers—“All these distant acquaintances claiming grief” (116)—also invokes the idea of grief ownership. By making a public performance of grief, the vigil attendees are asserting that they, too, have suffered a loss: that they’re in pain because Beth died and have earned a share of this communal sorrow.

The family scatters Beth and Rob’s ashes at the family cabin at Walden Pond in a ceremony that serves as a symbolic antithesis to the candlelight vigil. Just as the cabin represents an escape from the social ills associated with exploitation in literature, it also represents a separation from the artifice of social grief. The cabin physically and symbolically insulates the family from all the external sources of their suffering, allowing them to mourn Beth and process their grief without worrying about who is entitled to share in it and who is being insincere.

The way Meg, Jo, and Amy feel about performative grief is not necessarily the novel’s message about what role community, rituals, and public expressions should play in the wake of tragedy. After all, Jo’s manuscript is far from being a private expression of grief, yet its performative aspect is not treated as hypocrisy. The novel’s aim isn’t to assess the sincerity of grief performances but to expose the tensions that arise when people grieve, to explore the reasons behind those tensions, and to declare the healing powers of time, forgiveness, and familial love.