Eggs

The tumultuous friendship between David and Primrose illustrates the idea that friendship can fill the voids left by inadequate parental and familial attention. Prior to the children’s first meetings, the novel emphasizes their nontraditional family structures to indicate that both children receive less support than they need and have a wealth of unresolved feelings that need to be explored and expressed before they can be fully healed. Most notably, David continues to seethe in silent anger and grief over his mother’s death, and as the new kid in town, he has no ready-made friends just yet. Likewise, Primrose has an absent father who only exists in a picture frame, a mother who is not entirely present for her, and no friends her age. With these strong parallels in their lives, the two children instantly gravitate toward one another despite their somewhat antagonistic dynamic.

From the very beginning of their unusual friendship, David and Primrose commiserate over their family lives, specifically their lack of traditional mothers. David complains about his grandmother because “She thinks she’s my mother. Nobody’s my mother” (64), to which Primrose replies, “Same here” (64). Although Primrose’s mother is alive, she relates to David’s longing for motherly experiences and laments that she is missing out on key childhood moments—like being read to sleep—because of her unusual mother. Primrose wishes she had “a nice, normal mother like everybody else […] A mother that cooks dinner. That takes me places. That buys me stuff” (123). To approximate the sense of falling asleep to the sound of someone reading to her, she attends story time at the library; the attempt does not work as planned but does gain her a friend and ally in the form of David, as this second encounter with one another is the meeting that truly launches their bond.

David, too, has voids to fill after his mother’s death, and his friendship with Primrose helps him to cope with his grief despite his adherence to a series of superstitions related to his mother. By the final act of the novel, the two have often come to fill each other’s emotional needs, and they finally come together to heal each other’s deepest motherly wounds. In Chapter 37, when they are stuck in the wilderness with only the moonlight for company, Primrose hands David a comic and demands that he read to her. David obliges, understanding the gravity of Primrose’s request. When he runs out of comics to read, he begins to make up stories and finally gains the confidence to tell his favorite bedtime story, which he has studiously avoided ever since his mother’s death. Because “his mother had read it to him night after night” (202), he finally confronts his grief by revisiting this story for the purpose of bringing comfort to Primrose. And just as he helps Primrose, his unusual friend also helps him by taking him to see the sunrise. She uses reverse psychology to entice him by saying, “You don’t have to look. I won’t make you” (208) and then expressing her awe at the beauty before them. With Primrose’s help, David recognizes that “the time had come” (208) to face this particular aversion. He therefore watches the sun rise with Primrose and “[clings] to her, sobbing” (209). Thus, both David and Primrose manage to fill the voids left by each other’s parents, and it is clear that their friendship becomes a source of comfort in the absence of the parental attentions that they so desperately need.