Everyone Is Watching

“Her cystic fibrosis was stable for the moment, but she was fragile. Her last infection required a two-week hospital stay, a PICC line with multiple antibiotic infusions, therapies, and nebulizer treatments.”

Maire’s daughter, Dani, needs ongoing medical care that is both consistent (she always needs care) and variable (sometimes her needs are more intensive care). Similarly, thinking about her daughter’s illness has a dual and contradictory effect on Maire; it keeps her determined to win the competition even as it distracts her. Dani’s illness is thus a way to characterize Maire; Dani herself is absent from much of the text.

“Fern pushed back from the railing and felt a slight wobble of the iron. Fern would have to remind the guests not to lean against the railing and get it fixed as soon as possible.”

Fern’s reference to the wobbly iron railing early in the novel serves as a form of Chekhov’s gun, a trope that dictates that a dangerous object that appears early in a text (such as a gun) must influence the plot later (i.e., the gun should go off). The iron railing almost fulfills this trope: Cat and Ned nearly die when the railing gives way, only to actually fall because Cat pulls them to their deaths.

“There was no way Catalina was going to let millions of viewers into her actual bedroom. This was just too intrusive, but her ‘Lovelies,’ as Catalina called them, liked thinking they had a peek into her private, luxurious, beautiful world.”

Cat’s false bedroom draws upon the novel’s attention to the false intimacy created by reality television and online personalities. Cat finds it “intrusive” to let viewers see her real bedroom, while this intrusiveness—which might be less negatively framed as intimacy—is what contributes to Cat’s fame and what keeps viewers engaged in her content. They want to believe that her “luxurious, beautiful world” is real, and thus attainable.

“How much more could one person humanly take? It was abusive and Fern knew she couldn’t do this forever, but now the years of patience were paying off.”

Fern’s continual choice to stay working for Cat is analogous to the competitors’ decision to stay in the competition even as it becomes more dangerous. The novel is ambiguous about how to read this decision—Fern eventually does find that her work “pays off,” as Cat leaves her $10 million, just as several of the contestants get material gain from the show.

“Why shouldn’t she be the winner? She was in good shape and she was smart. She could read people. That was her superpower.”

Camille’s confidence in her abilities is only sometimes reinforced by the novel. On the one hand, Camille is shown to be smart and good at reading the room—she is the first one, for example, to suggest that the game show is a ruse and that the competitors should work together against the show’s conceit, while others resist. On the other hand, her flashbacks focus on her failures to read people, specifically Nan and Travis Wingo.

“An alert will go out, compelling people to stop what they are doing and tune in live.”

When Fern explains the conceit of the show—that One Lucky Winner will not be scheduled, but rather livestreamed at random times—she claims that viewers will be “compelled” to watch, dropping what they are doing. The novel upholds this claim, depicting viewers staying up late to watch, and describing the show as a huge success. This is part of the novel’s criticism of how the alluring drama of reality shows can prove dangerously seductive, both to watchers and participants.

“And most importantly, [Maire] was a mother and everything she did, every move she made, was for her children.”

Though Maire is evidently aware of her sympathetic appeal as the single mother of a sick child—she draws upon this image extensively in her confessional vault sessions—the novel is never entirely clear on the extent to which Maire has internalized this identity. While this excerpt from her internal narrative is presented without irony, Maire’s flashes of desire for Samuel, fierce anger at her competitors, and regret about the past suggest there is more to her. These flashes, however, are quickly stifled in favor of her mother persona.

“It made Fern wonder what other surprises One Lucky Winner had for them all.”

Fern’s shock that the Tasers were either accidentally or intentionally left on a powerful setting, as well as her grammatical inclusion of herself as someone to be “surprised” by the show, emphasizes Fern’s unclear role. Though she is nominally running One Lucky Winner—and, indeed, makes various choices to ensure that the show keeps going—she is also one of Cat’s pawns, often placed in the same emotional situations as the contestants.

“It appeared as if Armageddon had come to Napa and someone had built some sort of twisted playground atop a razed field.”

Camille’s sense of the obstacle course illustrates how the novel uses juxtaposition between what is expected and what is experienced to describe the settings of One Lucky Winner. The idyllic expectations of “Napa”—an idyllic northern California valley of vineyards—are contradicted by the “twisted playground atop a razed field”—an image that combines war imagery with sadistic childishness. The estate is consistently characterized by such contrasts: Ornate decor houses broken elements; finery clashes with half-built structures. The effect sets the competitors—and readers—on edge, as they cannot know what to expect from the landscape with which they are presented.

“Though it was well beyond her budget, Camille had to have it.”

Material desires are presented, in the text, as something dangerously appealing to all the characters. While only Camille struggles with overspending while trying to maintain an aura of luxury, nearly every character is faced with a dangerous desire for money more broadly. Here, the novel presents the effects on Camille specifically: Just as greed pulled her into illegal activity in the past, so too does it expose her to the danger of the game.

“Scorpions were poisonous. Deadly, even. Maire gritted her teeth. She wasn’t dead yet.”

Maire’s determination after being stung by scorpions shows her competitive side, but in her case, while Desperation Reveals True Character, her commitment to the game is often framed as being exclusively for her daughters’ sake. Her consideration that she is not “dead yet” indicates a dawning awareness that someone could die in this competition—but Maire is not yet considering the effect on her children of losing their mother, focusing instead on losing the money.

“Dani knew why her mother was doing this, why she was doing such dangerous things. It was for the money. They needed the money because her dad had run off and he had run away because Dani was sick and being sick was expensive. If only she would just get better, then her dad would come home, and her mom wouldn’t have to worry anymore.”

Dani’s guilt over the way her illness affects her family contrasts with Maire’s sentimental portrayal of herself as a mother who will sacrifice anything for her daughters. While Maire seems (however vaguely) to see being a contestant as noble—and viewers are largely moved by it—she does not take full stock of how Dani internalizes being someone who demands such sacrifice through no fault of her own.

“[Fern] felt sick, angry at how bloodthirsty the American public was to save someone like Ned.”

The novel here offers an indictment of a culture that allows serial sexual predators to face few, if any, consequences for their actions. While Ned is severely punished at the end of the novel—he dies violently—the criticism remains. The novel typically rejects Exposure as Punishment, but in Ned’s case, this comeuppance seems fitting: After many women come forward about his crimes, Ned’s reputation is posthumously destroyed.

“People are dangerous when they are backed into a corner.”

Maire here is talking about Crowley—for whom Desperation Reveals True Character when he returns to attack Fern for releasing information about his affair and illegitimate child. This comment, however, proves true for all the competitors in the game, as well as for Cat herself, who feels “backed into a corner” by her own upcoming death.

“Maybe a little more time in the wine cellar would do Cat some good. It would teach her that she can’t play with people’s lives for her own entertainment.

But wasn’t that what Fern was doing right now? Playing with people’s lives? She didn’t like the thought and quickly pushed it aside.”

Though Fern occasionally experiences moments of doubt about her complicity in the game show, they never manifest as concrete action. Rather, she dislikes such thoughts and so “pushes them aside,” indicating how easy it is to rationalize one’s actions, particularly when money or prestige is in play. In the end, Fern decides to run a second season of the show, indicating that she finds “playing with people’s lives” worth the money and fame she receives.

“Maire dreaded jumping into the lake, but she was more afraid of someone else getting the Super Clue. If the clue held incriminating information about her, she wanted to get to it first.”

As the game progresses, the contestants become increasingly motivated by the desire to protect their secrets. This illustrates that they value their reputations more than even their lives despite their claims about their altruistic motivations. Here, Maire nearly drowns in the freezing lake to safeguard any “incriminating information.”

“‘Why would she lie?’

‘Why would I?’ Samuel said.”

In this flashback, Maire and Samuel discuss something innocuous—their classmate Figgy’s false assertion that she kissed Samuel. Figgy is described as causing drama amongst her friends for the sheer delight of it. Samuel’s rebuttal that he has no reason to lie that the kiss never happened seems truthful—but also cannot be taken fully at face value in a novel that indicates that everyone has reasons to lie. The general uncertainty casts even this unimportant detail into doubt.

“[Fern] wasn’t sure how she had gotten here. Ambition? Greed? Probably both. But there was something more. There had to be.”

Fern wishes to see herself as someone who is continuing participation in the game for something more to her greed and ambition. She wants there to be “something more” to her than The Value of Money. This willful self-delusion applies to all characters, each of whom is highly invested in the narrative of being a good person. Only the cruel and manipulative Cat is honest about her motivations: She seeks revenge merely because she can.

“In the end, Fern would be the one holding the bag. Her name would be the one people remembered, the one that would be the butt of a thousand jokes. She could already see the memes.”

Even as the game proves more chaotic and dangerous, Fern decides to continue—a choice that stems from her desire to protect her own reputation, even at the potential expense of contestants’ health and safety. While she aims to keep the players alive, this is not an altruistic desire; she does so out of fear that their deaths will get her in legal trouble. The novel thus illustrates the other side of the fame that Fern so desires.

“So please, I’m begging you, keep me here as long as possible. For my family, One Lucky Winner is life and death.”

Maire’s heartfelt plea in her vault session frames the game as “life and death” for her family due to Dani’s illness. Commenters are generally, though not unilaterally, swayed by her emotional appeal. For readers, however, this offers a sense of irony, as the game is life and death for not only Maire and her family, but for all the contestants.

“The truth was, Camille had lost patients. All doctors did. Just maybe not in the way she lost Travis Wingo. A bullet for a bullet.”

During the dangerous roulette confession game, Camille considers her culpability in the death of Travis Wingo (a patient who was stalking her, who was shot by police at Camille’s false claim that he had a gun—a claim she made possibly to hide her financial crimes). Her assessment, even as she holds up the gun she assumes to be unloaded, that this is “a bullet for a bullet” indicates that she sees the parallels in Cat’s revenge game, even if she does not yet know the scope of Cat’s plan.

“Whatever you think you know, you’re wrong. There’s no proof. Nothing. We’ve led good lives. We’re good people. At least Samuel and I are.”

Maire’s claim that she and Samuel remain “good people” due to their “good lives” is one that the novel leaves more ambiguous; after the show ends, Samuel returns to his life, where he does contribute to charity, while Maire is rewarded with a million dollars—though this reward comes from Fern, another morally ambiguous character, so it is not clear whether this affirms Maire’s claim that she is a “good person.”

“Does this look fake to you? It’s real, every bit of it. Look! Look at what people are saying about the show.”

When Camille suspects that the show isn’t real—that they aren’t really being filmed or broadcast, and are only at the estate to be tormented for someone’s private amusement—she is partially right. However, for Fern, what makes the show “real” is that “people” are watching it—as the novel’s title makes clear, Fern’s goal is for those people to be “everyone.” For the contestants, this is both legitimating (they accept the show as “real”) and dangerous, as it means many people may know their secrets.