48 pages • 1-hour read
Famous Last Words
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Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Chapter 1 Summary
High school junior Willa Cresky arrives in Hollywood, California, with her mother, Joanna Cresky, and her new stepfather, a film director named Jonathan Walters. Willa and her mother have just moved from Connecticut to live with Jonathan. As they ride in a stretch limousine to their new mansion at 2121 Sunbird Lane, Jonathan points out landmarks and recounts the history of their home’s previous owner, actress Diana Del Mar, who died there. Alone in her new room, Willa performs a secret ritual with a ring and candle, attempting to contact her deceased father, for whose death she feels responsible. During the ritual, a minor earthquake shakes the house. Later, when Joanna checks on her, they discover that the ritual candle has mysteriously relit itself. Willa quickly hides her ritual objects, unsettled by the event and burdened by her secret guilt.
Chapter 2 Summary
During their first dinner together, Jonathan discusses the “Hollywood Killer,” a serial killer who has been murdering actresses in Los Angeles and staging the killings to recreate violent scenes from classic movies. Jonathan gives Willa expensive gifts including a Gucci backpack and a new laptop, making her uncomfortable with an overly earnest speech in which he says that he could never replace her father but hopes to be “friends.” Willa finds the luxury backpack embarrassing and prefers her old laptop: Though old and rickety, it was a gift from her father.
At 3:23 am, she awakens with a headache to find her ritual candle lit for a third time. To calm herself, she goes for a swim in the backyard pool. While she is underwater, an unseen force grabs her ankles and pulls her down. Looking up, she sees a woman’s corpse floating on the surface above her.
Chapter 3 Summary
The invisible force in the pool releases Willa, and the corpse vanishes just as Jonathan arrives. To hide the supernatural event, Willa lies, claiming that her necklace got caught in the pool filter.
The next morning, Joanna drives Willa to her first day at Langhorn Academy. On the way, she gives Willa a leather journal and encourages her to write again, something she hasn’t done since her father died. Willa accepts the gift but remains emotionally closed off, reflecting on her inability to confide in her mother about her grief, her ex-boyfriend Aiden, or her escalating strange experiences.
Chapter 4 Summary
In the cafeteria, Willa meets Marnie Delaine, a cynical but friendly student who introduces Willa to her clique, the “Hollywood kids,” defined by their parents’ work as film directors and studio executives. She gives a taxonomy of the other cliques, including the “pretty people,” the “Ivy League Army,” and the “trust-fund kids.” Marnie warns Willa to stay away from Wyatt Sheppard, an ostracized student obsessively researching the Hollywood Killer.
Later, in chemistry class, their teacher assigns Willa as Wyatt’s lab partner. He is cold and dismissive toward her, and she glimpses a list of names in his red notebook before he hides it. He rebuffs her attempt at conversation after class.
Chapter 5 Summary
Willa discovers that she accidentally took Wyatt’s red notebook. Inside, she finds detailed notes on the Hollywood Killer’s victims and the movie scenes they reenacted. Disturbed, she hides the notebook and goes for a walk, getting locked out of the house. Jonathan’s assistant, Reed Thornton, lets her in. Willa has an instant crush on Reed, who tells her that he graduated two years ago from Langhorn, the same school she now attends. While they talk in her room, Willa is struck by a vivid vision: She experiences the final moments of the killer’s first victim, Brianna Logan, as a male captor prepares her for a “performance” involving fake birds.
Chapter 6 Summary
Shaken, Willa lies to Reed about the cause of her distress, realizing that she just witnessed a murder through the victim’s eyes. After Reed leaves, Willa’s mother returns home with newly dyed blonde hair. At dinner, her parents forbid her from swimming alone for her safety, which makes her feel angry and misunderstood.
Later in the week, tension with Wyatt escalates during a chemistry experiment. Feeling that his hostility is unfair, Willa decides to punish him by keeping his notebook over the weekend, resolving to turn it into the lost-and-found on Monday.
Chapter 7 Summary
While home alone on Friday night, Willa watches the movie The Birds and hears a disembodied voice say, “THIS IS THE KIND OF DREAM YOU DON’T WAKE UP FROM, HENRY” (58). Frustrated and unnerved, she writes her first angry entry in her journal. A persistent dripping sound leads her into Jonathan’s forbidden office, where she finds the bathroom tub mysteriously overflowing. She sees a strange face in the water’s reflection just as her parents return. When she fetches them to look at the face, the tub is empty and dry. Jonathan admonishes her for being in his office, deepening her isolation.
Chapter 8 Summary
On Saturday, Marnie visits, and they spend a happy afternoon driving through Laurel Canyon and eating at a diner. The normalcy is shattered back at the house when Marnie suggests that they watch the movie Kiss of Death. The title triggers another vision. Willa experiences events through the eyes of Faith Fernandes, the killer’s second victim. She sees her captor—a man wearing a necklace with a rose charm—prepare her for a “final performance” that involves a wheelchair.
Chapter 9 Summary
Willa manages to hide the disturbing episode from a concerned Marnie. After Marnie leaves, Willa finds Wyatt waiting for her in the den. He confronts her about his missing notebook. When Willa denies seeing it, Wyatt calmly accuses her of being a habitual liar, accurately pointing out her tells. The tense confrontation is interrupted by Reed, who senses Willa’s discomfort and provides an escape.
After Wyatt leaves, Reed admits that he was trying to help. Alone, Willa is left devastated and ashamed, realizing that Wyatt saw straight through her carefully constructed facade of lies.
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
The opening chapters establish a supernatural framework that correlates with Willa’s psychological trauma over her father’s death. The paranormal manifestations—such as the mysteriously relighting candle, the corpse in the pool, and the overflowing bathtub—function as external projections of The Haunting Power of Unresolved Guilt. Willa’s nightly ritual of contacting her deceased father through the ring and candle creates an opening to the spirit realm, making clear that her guilt and grief over her father’s death are the source of her haunting, even as her visions appear unconnected to her father. As Willa experiences the murder victims’ deaths from their own perspectives, her heightened empathy emerges as a consequence of her own experience with loss. The italicized passages shifting into victims’ perspectives create a doubling effect: Willa’s guilt resonates with the victims’ terror, establishing thematic links between personal trauma and collective suffering.
Water emerges as the novel’s central motif, functioning as a liminal space where truth and deception, memory and reality, and life and death intersect. The pool serves as a place of refuge for Willa, who has always loved and felt safe in the water, but it is also the site of her most dramatic supernatural encounter, where she experiences a vision of a floating corpse and the terror of being pulled under by an invisible force. This dual nature reflects Willa’s complex relationship with her father’s death, which occurred during a swimming incident for which she holds herself responsible. The pool represents both the space where her trauma originated and the possibility of cleansing and renewal. The bathtub scene in Jonathan’s office intensifies this symbolic function, as the mysteriously overflowing tub becomes a site of supernatural intrusion into domestic space. When Willa sees a stranger’s face reflected in the water, the narrative suggests that water serves as a portal between worlds, allowing the dead to communicate with the living. The recurring dripping sounds create auditory manifestations of temporal persistence, suggesting that traumatic memories seep into present consciousness with the same inevitability as water finding its way through cracks.
The Hollywood setting provides a framework for exploring The Tension Between the Self and the Persona, as characters construct elaborate facades to navigate their social and emotional landscapes. Willa’s transition from Connecticut to Los Angeles forces her to assume a new identity as the stepdaughter of a successful director, yet this performance conflicts with her sense of who she is. Her lies to her mother about her ongoing symptoms—headaches, visions, and paranormal encounters—represent a performance designed to shield her family from worry. While Willa strives to maintain her sense of self despite the performances she is forced into, her new friend Marnie embodies the danger of losing the self to the persona. Marnie’s constant fabrications and social maneuvering at Langhorn Academy exemplify how performance becomes a survival mechanism within competitive environments. Her dismissive attitude toward various social groups and her cynical worldview mask her own vulnerabilities and need for authentic connection. The entertainment industry creates an environment where the distinction between self and persona becomes increasingly blurred, making it difficult for characters to recognize genuine connection when it occurs.
Written texts—notebooks, journals, and screenplays—function as repositories for hidden truths and dangerous knowledge. Wyatt’s red notebook, containing details of the Hollywood Killer’s crimes, initially misdirects both Willa and the reader, suggesting a dangerous fascination with violence. In reality, Wyatt’s compulsion to solve the crimes mirrors Willa’s own, and the notebook becomes a symbol of reason and factual evidence in contrast to Willa’s reliance on The Value of Intuition. The journal that Joanna gives her represents the potential for self-expression and healing through writing, yet Willa’s inability to use it effectively demonstrates how trauma can silence creative voice. When she finally writes that “[she] would just like for things to be easy for a little while” (59), the simple wish reveals the profound exhaustion underlying her performed composure. The references to Diana Del Mar’s lost screenplay and the mysterious message suggest that written texts in this narrative contain prophetic or supernatural significance, serving as vessels for communication between the living and the dead.
Italicized passages plunge the reader into victims’ consciousness alongside Willa. This structural technique suggests that past trauma intrudes on present consciousness. Willa’s experience of “becoming” Brianna Logan and Faith Fernandes through visions demonstrates how empathy can become a form of possession, where boundaries between self and other dissolve under shared suffering.
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