I Found You

“Alice is a woman often described by men as sexy. Dirty too. She’s never traded on being pretty.”

This passage develops Alice’s character. She is not dainty or reserved, but projects heteronormative female sexuality. Jewell establishes Alice’s lustful nature here to foreshadow how she will sleep with Frank shortly after meeting him, and while he still has no memory of who he is.

“But she was suddenly quite desirable—he could see that—raw and new like a half-blossomed flower, embarrassingly beautiful, in fact.”

Gray realizes his little sister has physically grown up but is still psychologically innocent. Jewell uses a simile, or direct comparison, to connect Kirsty and a flower that is blooming. Flowers are often associated with female genitalia and virginity, and Jewell uses these associations to develop Kirsty’s character.

“She looks again at the new block of flats and sees a flicker of light from a first-floor window […] right now the flickering light is all she has.”

After her husband goes missing, Lily notices a light in the Wolf’s Hill Boulevard housing development behind their house. This light is a clue to Gray’s abduction of Mark; Gray tied up and strangled Mark in the abandoned development. Lily’s suspicions about the light end up being correct.

“A few years ago. I saw a man walk into the sea. He took his clothes off and folded them up in a neat pile and then just walked until his head went under.”

Alice says this to Frank when he begins to remember a man drowning in the sea. The symbolism of the sea changes from the beginning of the novel; it becomes dark. The sea here, and to Frank, is a site of death. However, in the case Alice describes, the sea is suicide, but for Frank’s father, it is murder.

“But he is not a friendly dog. He keeps his distance from people. But here he is, offering himself up to a stranger, echoing, in some poetic way, Alice’s own subliminal desires.”

This is a description of Griff putting his chin on Frank’s knee. Using the dog’s affection toward Frank to symbolize Alice’s sexual desire is a trope that hints at the animal, instinctive nature of her passion for Frank.

“It is like onions. People reveal themselves to you a layer at a time. That is why you should wait. Wait until you get to the layers near the bottom. Usually where the worst stuff is. And then, if the worst stuff is not so bad, then you marry.”

Lily’s mother uses an onion simile to describe identity: identity is layered, and it takes time to peel back the layers. Many layers are memories, which develops The Relationship Between Memory and Love. Lily married too quickly, before she discovered Mark’s most hidden layer: a psychopath who assaults and kills people.

“The four of them stood together for a moment, gathered around the front door, the back draft of Mark and his strange anger holding them together like fence posts.”

This description of the Ross family appears after Mark gets upset when Kirsty turns him down for a date, saying she is ill. The simile of fence posts highlights how they are an ideal family, a family with a white picket fence, before Mark destroys them. They all support Kirsty in her decision about Mark; her father’s support later costs him his life.

“He points at the grand house on the furthest tip of the cliff, the one with the yew trees and the flat roof.”

This is Jewell’s description of Kitty’s house. Her property illustrates her high socioeconomic class, which is part of The Intersection of Class and Criminality. Furthermore, the location of her house, near the cliff, can be connected to the earlier allusions to the movie Cliffhanger. Kirsty and Mark see the movie, and Mark thinks that because he is a higher class, Kirsty should have made out with him during the movie.

“There was a sea of heads between him and Mark, but he could hear him from here.”

This is part of Jewell’s sea symbolism. The metaphorical sea between Mark and Gray in this scene foreshadows how the literal North Sea will be between them when Mark swims away with Kirsty. Gray crossing this metaphorical sea leads to him and Kirsty attending the party where Mark attacks Kirsty.

“Alice’s own immediate and completely instinctual certainty that he was wrong, that those big, soft hands could never have hurt anyone and that she is not making a mistake letting him into her life.”

Alice thinks this after Frank confesses that he’s concerned he killed someone. She doesn’t think he’s a killer, which turns out to be correct, but he did strangle Mark. Ultimately, Alice can accept violence as retribution for killing Frank’s sister and father, but his hands are not as innocent as she hoped. This reflection furthers the symbolism of hands in the novel.

“The lilies in the hallway were dying.”

Part of the setting of Kitty’s house in 1993 connects to the present-day character of Lily. She chooses this nickname because of the familiarity of the flower as opposed to British people’s inability to pronounce her Ukrainian name. Also, her love for Carl/Mark dies when she discovers the truth about him. The flowers in Gray’s point-of-view chapter cross over into Lily’s point-of-view.

“You live in your lovely, cozy little mummy-daddy-brother-sister bubble. Of cozy cottages. And pub dinners. Of day trips.”

This rant of Mark’s develops ideas about The Intersection of Class and Criminality. He lived a traumatic life before he was adopted but quickly adapted to being upper class. Gray and Kirsty don’t understand the extremes of Mark’s life. Mark believes his socioeconomic class entitles him to Kirsty’s sexual favors because she is lower class, which is indicated by where she stays, what she eats, and what activities she takes part in.

“She pulls open a wardrobe and there is the scent of jasmine, of clean clothes.”

As in Quote 12, flower imagery connects different points of view. Here, Lily smells jasmine in Kitty’s house. This can be connected to Alice’s daughter being named Jasmine. The teenager isn’t as sweet as the fragrance, providing a narrative juxtaposition.

“She kisses his cheek and he smiles at her and then he’s gone, leaving her alone in the dark kitchen with the buzzing fridge and the darkness and the dogs.”

After a tender moment between Alice and Kai, she deeply feels the lack of a romantic partner. Alice cares for her children but longs for adult companionship. This passage exemplifies Jewell’s attentiveness to portraying domestic life and characterization.

“She feels completely alone when Russ has hung up.”

This passage can be discussed alongside the previous one. Lily is Alice’s foil: They are opposites in age, appearance, and attitudes. However, they both are lonely without romantic partners; love is important to both of them in these moments. Later, they are foils in how their romantic relationships with Mark and Graham end.

“Traveling into London with eight fourteen-year-olds was a little like being a circus master.”

This is the beginning of the third part of the novel, which takes place in Gray’s life three weeks before he meets Alice. His identity is, before seeing Mark, completely innocuous: a math teacher herding students. Jewell describes him with the simile of a “circus master” to give a vivid image of his character before changing it, heightening the change’s narrative impact.

“She asked him about it once, and he said it was a childhood accident. That had made her love the scar, love it both as a physical part of him and as a symbolic emblem of the personal history he so very rarely shared with her.”

Mark got this scar from Gray defending himself against Mark with a coat hanger. Lily is in love with the lie Mark told her about the scar because it was supposedly revealing a memory. When she learns the events that truly resulted in the scar, her love for Mark dies. This develops The Relationship Between Memory and Love.

“Of course I care about the story. That’s my job. But caring about ‘the story’ doesn’t mean I don’t care about the outcome or about the players.”

This is how Lesley replies when Lily says Lesley is only interested in the story. Jewell includes the story that Lesley writes in the next part of the novel; it is a major intertextual element. This quote foreshadows how Lesley will get her story and help people.

“‘What was it about Mark that you fell in love with?’ Lily shrugs. The question is not meant to be friendly. The question she is really asking is, How could you have chosen such a monster to be your husband?”

Lesley’s question to Lily develops The Relationship Between Memory and Love. Lily’s love is rooted in ignorance of Mark’s crimes. She falls for him because he doesn’t share his memories with her. Once she knows what he’s hiding, she can no longer love him.

“‘I do like being called Frank,’ he says dreamily, ‘I miss it.’ ‘You’ll always be Frank to me,’ she says.”

The name Frank represents the amnesiac version of the man that Alice saves. He likes it because it reminds him how generous and trusting Alice was. Alice likes the name because it represents her first impression of him: the moment she was initially attracted to him. The name Frank is born out of a bond of love.

“Graham is a good man. Not exciting. But good. Graham is good husband material.”

In the end, Frank settles on the name Graham. Even though it was his birth name, he didn’t use it; he used the nickname Gray instead. Reclaiming his birth name is a way to reinvent himself as a suitable romantic partner for Alice. His new identity, like his identity as Frank, is partially born out of a bond of love and completes the arc of his character.

“‘I can do family,’ she says. ‘Family with baggage?’ ‘I can do most things.’ He smiles. ‘I know,’ he says.”

Alice’s confidence in herself and Graham’s belief in her are the end of her character arc. She is stronger and more self-assured because she was right about Graham: He hasn’t done anything that would keep her from loving him. The doubts that plagued her for most of the novel are gone once the truth is revealed.

“She’d been acting the role of the scary woman for years because deep down inside she was scared. Scared of being alone. Scared of being an outsider. Scared that she’d had all her chances at happiness and blown each and every one of them.”

Graham admits that Alice was a little scary the first time they met, and this passage is Alice’s reflections on that. Jewell repeats the word “scared” to highlight how Alice’s character moves away from the fears of loneliness, exclusion, and being too late. At the end of the novel, Alice has hope in her new relationship, confidence in her judgment, and comfort in her community.