“In my defense, I could claim that I needed a part-time job to support my own fledgling pottery business, that there wasn’t much other work around […]

But that would only be one version of the story. Told differently, another version would say that I was obsessed with Anna, seeking her out and exploiting my privileged access to her, once I had gained it.

The truth sits somewhere between the two.”

In this passage, Malicka begins to directly allude to the idea that Gus is an unreliable narrator. The passage emphasizes the limitations of Gus’s perspective, even deploying a variation of the novel title to qualify her story (“In my defense”). This is immediately followed by an admission that there is another version to the story, acknowledging that truth is more complicated than the report of one’s perspective. Gus’s reports of what happened should therefore be held suspect.

“This photo had been captured by someone who evidently adored her, and who had reveled in her glorious girlhood. It felt pitiful to compare myself to her, but Mary and I were not too different in age, and nothing like this existed of me.”

Before the novel reveals the truth about Gus’s past, the novel frames Gus’s relationship with Anna as an attempt to function as a surrogate for Mary. This passage drives this idea by showing Gus directly comparing herself to Mary after observing how much the picture captures Anna’s affection for Mary. This implies the absence of such affection from Gus’s own life, foreshadowing the exposition of her backstory later on.

“That had been the hardest lesson of my breakup: to wait and see if they come back to you. That the true art of loving is in the letting go.”

Gus alludes to a breakup in this passage, willfully holding back the details of the relationship that resulted in this insight. While this passage is meant to drive Gus’s sympathy for Anna, it also foreshadows several plot details, including Gus’s relationship with Mary, the fact that Jean is the person who shares this insight with Gus, and Gus’s misconception that Jean was breaking her up with Mary on Mary’s behalf. Once these details reappear later on in the narrative, it reframes the context of this passage, underscoring Gus’s unreliability as a narrator.

“You can’t carry resentment, Gussie. For one, it wrecks the skin. But also, what people don’t understand is, no one gives you a manual for motherhood. No one tells you how on earth to do any of it. Then, just at the moment you work it out, bam. Your children are grown up. They’ve got this scorecard on you, but it’s too late. They’re gone.”

Anna shares this insight on motherhood with Gus, which helps to justify her character as a flawed individual. Anna’s awareness that she has made crucial mistakes in raising Mary defuses some of the tension surrounding her character, while also driving her willingness to seek redemption for those errors. This consequently drives Gus’s sympathy for Anna.

“‘I’m lost,’ she admits quietly. ‘When your child is born, it’s like you get these strange new coordinates. One is your life and the other is theirs. They might grow up, but their life is still inside you. They remain always inside you. Nested, just like a Russian doll. Without her, it’s like there’s something missing inside me. I feel—not just lost—but utterly hollowed out.’

A subdued silence descends over the courtroom. Up in the gallery, Lucy Ayres covers her face with her hands.”

In this passage, Lucy is reinforced as a mirror for Anna, one who remains detached from Gus’s emotional connection with Mary. The fact that Lucy covers her face to cry suggests that she empathizes wholeheartedly with Anna’s admission. Even though Gus never knew Oriel, she witnesses how Jean’s manipulations have affected Lucy, too.

“Mary Finbow sits at the front, on the floor, wearing the little red shorts I always liked, her long legs stretched across the cobblestones ahead of her, a Birkinesque wicker handbag on her lap. And I am there, too, alongside her, my hair sun-bleached and longer. I am crouching there, smiling dreamily, my hand gripping hold of her knee, barely balancing.”

Part 1 ends on a major plot twist, revealing that Gus has known Mary all along. The physical details of the image that show this hint at the intimacy between them: Gus places her hand on Mary’s knee and struggles to balance, reflecting her precarious attempts to stay in Mary’s good graces. This glimpse also leaves out the full reality of their relationship, which is more complicated than the image suggests, as was the case with Anna’s photographs of Mary growing up.

“She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with a gray, tired expression on her face, and earphones plugged into her head. I stared, willing her to look at me, but she was studying something in her hands. She was in the same clothes from the night before, and that realization triggered a shiver of envy. I fantasized about who Vincenzo might be: tall and blond and as entitled-looking as she was. I imagined him opening the car passenger door for Mary. Her sliding in, letting him steal a sideways kiss on the mouth.”

In this passage, Malicka underscores Gus’s blossoming crush on Mary by having her fantasize about the scenario of her date with Vincenzo. A crucial detail is the abstract quality of Vincenzo: He has the general features of an attractive person, but largely resembles Mary, implying that she is Gus’s standard of attractiveness. This allows Gus to see Vincenzo as a surrogate for herself, imagining the sensations of kissing Mary as Gus watches her from afar.

“In times of intense stress, I still find myself dreaming of her, and the night before Mary’s evidence, Polly came back to me again. This time with Mary.”

The elements of Gus’s dream reveal her subconscious belief that a romantic relationship with Mary can help her to overcome her childhood trauma. Gus frequently dreams of Polly because of the unresolved nature of their relationship, which was prematurely brought to an end by their school and parents. When Mary accompanies Polly in Gus’s dream, it is because Gus sees Mary as a parallel or twin of Polly. Because Gus cannot resolve her relationship with Polly, she can redeem herself by trying to resolve her crush on Mary, which drives Navigating the Boundaries Between Friendship and Therapy as a theme.

“Deep down, I know Jean would have found a way to me. Or I to her. That might be her chief legacy: To see the universe as fated. To believe that some humans are marked out for collision, no matter what we do.”

In this passage, Gus remarks on the events of her first meeting with Jean in retrospect, carrying with it the wisdom of the knowledge that Jean is a manipulator. This comment acknowledges the naivety of the younger Gus, who is too willing to believe in the serendipity of their encounter as a seed for their friendship, while the older Gus implies that Jean likely orchestrated this encounter, passing it off as a chance meeting, underscoring Jean’s sinister nature.

“‘People say I give too much of myself. Today was hard. I had an extremely difficult client. Her name’s Oriel, she’s quite resistant.’ She brightened. ‘But then you came.’”

Through this passage, Malicka evokes dramatic irony from the braided narrative structure of the novel. Jean frames Oriel as a nuisance whose presence was superseded by Gus’s arrival. Gus feels wanted and valued, but Jean’s comment glosses over the details of what caused the tension between Oriel and Jean. Because Oriel has already been referenced in Gus’s experiences at the trial, the reader already knows that Oriel is another victim of Jean’s exploitation, which Jean hides in plain sight from Gus.

“Therapy, I had already concluded, was a rich person’s privilege that I couldn’t afford. The girls from the Melrose often talked about their shrinks’ analyses of their thoughts and actions: why they drank so much, painted badly, fought with their parents, or slept around. They were given a narrative framework for their lives. A better story to tell themselves.”

This passage supports the theme of Weaponizing Social Class as a Tool for Exploitation. Gus sees therapy as a privileged form of care, rather than a right. Because of her financial background, Gus projects her resentment of Mary’s wealthy peers onto the practice of therapy in general. Ironically, once she starts to undergo therapy with Jean, she falls into the same patterns of behavior she outlines here.

“If Mary was going to want me, she’d need to think there were parallels between our lives. So I made my childhood sound if not as glamorous as hers then eccentric in its own way. When we talked during our portrait sessions, I made out that my parents were members of a made-up intelligentsia: teachers, rather than classroom assistants. Then, perhaps most inventively of all, I made out that my parents were devoted to me. I was the apple of their eye, their life’s focus, and not the source of an awkward problem they wanted to tidy away.”

Gus’s shame over her financial background extends to the way she characterizes herself before Mary. In the same way that Gus idealizes Mary, she also idealizes herself, trying to portray herself the way she wishes she had grown up. Though this evokes Mary’s envy, especially when Gus indicates that her parents dote on her, Gus drives a wide gap between Mary’s understanding of her and the reality of her character.

“Now, as I observe her in the courtroom below, I still desperately miss the beam of Jean’s attention. Her tender acceptance of who I am. All the comfort she once stood for. It shames me how much I still love her. How, despite all her false promises and everything she used me for, there is still a part of me who wants her to love me, too.”

In this passage, Malicka complicates the action surrounding Gus’s role in the trial by revealing that a part of her maintains an emotional attachment to Jean. This stresses the severity of Gus’s conditioning under her relationship with Jean, who regularly blurred the line between therapist and friend in order to gain Gus’s loyalty. This complication drives Navigating the Boundaries Between Friendship and Therapy, as Gus becomes conflicted over betraying someone she sees as a friend more than a healthcare provider.

“‘We are friends. I care a great deal about you. But there are also boundaries.’

‘I’m sorry—’

‘And people pay for my expertise. It’s not something I can just keep giving away.’

‘I know—’

She jabbed a thumb toward the bottle of wine that I’d drained. ‘And I’m not like Mary, or those other girls,’ she said, raising her eyebrows with mock authority. ‘I don’t have endless reserves for you to sponge off of.’”

In this passage, Jean weaponizes her goodwill against Gus, reframing her acts of friendship as an exploitation of her professional services as a therapist. This passage directly represents Navigating the Boundaries Between Friendship and Therapy, as Jean makes Gus feel guilty for using her when she has willfully blurred those boundaries to manipulate Gus. The fact that Jean won’t even let Gus finish her apology underscores how little she is interested in seeking reconciliation with Gus.

“What Jean reflected back was the idea that most of my troubles were caused by other people: my parents, my teachers, my earliest friendships. Such a seductive concept, or so it seemed at the time, to believe all my issues were not intrinsic to me, but had an external cause. Finally, I thought, I could crawl out from under the weight of my own mind and look outward. Initially, that felt brighter. For a while, my brain felt flossed clean.”

Gus’s experience of therapy with Jean suggests the usual approach she takes to wear down her clients’ trust in other people and build up their dependence on her. In this passage, this process begins with an abdication of responsibility. This recontextualizes Gus’s willingness to see her parents as the catalysts of her childhood trauma, informing her resentment of them in the present. Once she learns to grow away from this trauma later on in the novel, she stops blaming them for their actions.

“‘You’ve enjoyed our sessions together, haven’t you, Gus?’ Jean smiled tetchily toward me, through the steamy bathroom air. ‘Haven’t I made you feel so much better?’

My tongue darted across the tiny mouth ulcers which were developing along my lower lip from the pills. ‘So much better.’

‘Why wouldn’t we want that for our other friends, too?’”

In this passage, Jean drives the theme of Weaponizing Social Class as a Tool for Exploitation by making Gus feel like she has a responsibility to draw more clients to Jean’s service. Jean’s questions function rhetorically, intended to remind Gus of her dependence and the debt of free counseling. Her final question (“Why wouldn’t we want that for our other friends, too?”) crucially uses the pronoun “we” to signal that Gus is acting in concert with Jean, as though Gus is an extension of her.

“But there was no tenderness in Mary’s rendering of me; it was formulaic. I knew then that Mary didn’t love me at all. The pain of that knowledge hit me in successive waves.”

Gus’s first glimpse at the portrait Mary has been working on of her begins the process of disillusioning her from her crush on Mary. Gus draws a contrast between the words “tenderness” and “formulaic,” indicating that there is nothing unique about Mary’s perspective of her. Rather, Mary is working derivatively, pulling less from the desire to express her feelings for Gus than from a desire to get her technique “right.” The portrait becomes a prominent symbol for the gap between perception and truth.

“How dare you come into my home and spread this utter bile about my closest friend? Lawrence has been a part of our family for years. Whereas you are a liar. A liar who we trusted with everything!”

Anna’s response to Gus’s accusations against Lawrence drives the idea that Mary will experience further abuse, no matter which way the trial goes. Her unwillingness to believe the accusations confirms that she did not condone or was even aware of Lawrence’s abuse, but it also means that she is reluctant to accept that she has exposed Mary to abusive conditions, especially when she has trusted Lawrence for so long. It is easier for her to cast Gus and her accusations out instead because their connection is newer and therefore weaker than that between Anna and Lawrence.

“‘I have a great deal of unused capacity that I have not turned to my advantage. I feel unable to protect myself in dangerous situations.’ My voice wobbles at the last: ‘I feel that there is something wrong with me deep down inside, that if people really knew me, they would leave.’”

As Gus reads through the statements she identifies with in Jean’s reference material, she verbally stumbles over the last statement, which reveals a deeper truth about her self-perception. Gus believes she needs the attention of others to make her feel like there is nothing wrong with her. Paradoxically, she also fears that they will either get tired or repulsed by her, which forces her to distance them from the truth about herself.

“‘So let the story come out! They aren’t your accusations to make. The truth is, whatever happened with him and Mary, this is still a vulnerability that Ms. Guest has exploited. If it wasn’t Lawrence, there would be some other wound she’d be prizing open for her own benefit.’ I shiver and she proceeds more carefully. ‘Which is why your account of how she coerced you is so important.’”

In this passage, Malicka underscores The Limits of the Law in Addressing Injustice as a theme by re-centering the trial around Anna’s libel charge, rather than the circumstances surrounding Mary’s abuse. Carr’s assertion that the issue with Lawrence will work itself out exposes how limited the scope of the law can be when it is maneuvered to focus on one issue to the exclusion of others. Gus realizes that even if she were to testify against Lawrence in court, none of it would be admitted as relevant to the trial.

“‘I thought that you liked being with me. Wanted it. I thought it was nice. I thought we were having fun.’

‘I didn’t want it, Gussie,’ Mary gasps, now wiping tears of her own. ‘I needed a friend.’ She grips desperately at her abdomen, and her voice falters. ‘I want—need—a friend.’”

This passage marks a turning point in Gus and Mary’s relationship, as it becomes clear to Gus that Mary has become so reliant on Jean that she has turned against Gus. Mary’s assertion that she “needs,” as opposed to simply wanting a friend, indicates that she has no sense of how to live independently without a companion like Jean to lead her, underscoring Navigating the Boundaries Between Friendship and Therapy as a theme. Gus’s assumption that Mary wanted to be friends with her, on the other hand, signals her wisdom that friendship isn’t a need, but something that is freely entered upon by people who want the other’s company.

“Speaking truthfully under oath is the backbone of this country’s legal system.”

Ibrahim’s assertion that Gus has failed to protect the integrity of the British legal system by including falsehoods in her testimony evokes irony because nearly everyone who speaks up at the trial misrepresents the truth in one way or another. Jean is especially guilty because the novel shows that she willfully misrepresented the truth to manipulate others, contradicting her own witness statements in court. The fact that the court privileges Jean’s falsehoods over the ones made by Gus drives the novel’s representation of The Limits of the Law in Addressing Injustice.

“When I think of everything that happened, I realize that none of us were seeing each other properly. All we perceived were outlines from which we derived stories, competing narratives: contradictory, overlapping, very few of them objectively true.”

This passage marks Gus’s maturity and the resolution of her personal character arc. She gains the wisdom that perception and truth are two different things, and what people think of each other is hardly indicative of the truth. She demonstrates this with her reflection on the dynamics between herself, Mary, Anna, and Jean, realizing they all saw each other differently than how they really were. The “contradictory” nature of these perceptions does not invalidate them, however. Rather, they speak to more complex truths that make a person.