“But now I hate my uterus. I imagine I can feel it, like a rock inside.”

Polly experiences intense frustration and alienation from her own body. The simile compares her uterus to a heavy, useless burden. The physical imagery makes her emotional pain tangible, and it shows how infertility has transformed her sense of self. The short, declarative sentences create a stark, brutal tone that evokes the rawness of her feelings. It also reflects the theme of identity, as she experiences conflict with her own body.

“I felt like myself was running out of me, like I was becoming hollow, would sink to the floor like a punctured balloon.”

The monthly cycle of hope and disappointment has left Polly emotionally and physically exhausted—or, as her simile suggests, deflated. The imagery of her hollowness conveys how her body’s menstrual cycles exacerbate her sense of incompleteness. Polly links her fertility struggles to her broader interrogation of who she is, as with each period, she feels she’s less likely to reach her goal.

“I held my father’s hand on the veranda at Edgemere, tracing the bulging veins beneath the thin skin. His bloodline. My bloodline.”

Tactile imagery connects Polly physically to her father, mirroring the bonds of family and heredity. The repetition of “bloodline” reinforces her preoccupation with genetics and identity, especially in the context of her father’s illness and her inability to conceive. Jack’s visible veins under thin skin are a sign of his fragility and mortality but also of the life force that still pulses within. Tracing his hand is an intimate act that reflects Polly’s connection to her father.

“Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.”

Using the words of a great author, as she often does, Polly attempts to reconcile emotional turmoil with rational understanding. By citing Molière, she seeks answers for her own struggles with infertility, family revelations, and loss by contrasting feeling and thinking. Polly’s philosophizing acknowledges the universal human experience of balancing both joy and pain.

“The weight of disappointment, disenchantment, lay on the table surface between us, between my hands and hers.”

This line captures the emotional tension in Talia and Polly’s first encounter as they both must recalibrate their expectations. They both come to the meeting vulnerable, and the disappointment of unmet expectations is palpable; Talia was hoping for a family connection, and Polly is confronting the complications of the DNA test. The phrase “between my hands and hers” personalizes the distance, showing how the answers they seek remain just out of grasp. Talia’s experience foreshadows Polly’s, as she must endure profound disappointment when she learns the truth about her parentage.

“I’d finally gotten exhausted with interrogating my psyche as I was interrogating my ovaries. With what seemed like similar results, or lack of same.”

This line reveals Polly’s dual struggle with self-understanding and fertility, drawing a parallel between mental and physical interrogation. The repetition of “interrogating” emphasizes the intensity and relentlessness of her self-scrutiny and conveys her frustration and sense of futility, as both her emotional exploration and her attempts to conceive yield inconclusive, unsatisfying answers. The humor and poignancy characterize Polly’s candid, reflective narrative voice while emphasizing that circumstances are testing her identity.

“For years I have negotiated with my body: Look, look at how good I’m being. No dice, my body has replied.”

Polly personifies her body as an unyielding antagonist. The repetition of “look” conveys her desperation and earnestness, while her body’s response is a blunt, frustrating answer without clarity or closure. This dialogue with her body reveals the tension between her desire for control and the body’s indifference. Polly measures her self-worth against her body’s responses, and she feels that she is losing the battle.

“Maybe all of those different selves were why, despite outside appearances, from the inside my life at the moment felt like a maelstrom, me pinned against the wall of everyday by centrifugal force.”

A simile conveys Polly’s internal chaos, likening her life to a disorienting storm and herself to someone pinned by centrifugal force. She hides her struggles beneath a composed exterior. Yet internally, her analytical mind is trying to make sense of all this emotional upheaval. The dissonance between control and chaos shows how Polly’s identity is pulled in multiple directions at once.

“In practice, I had wanted more of a standard-issue mother when I was a kid, not a role model.”

In a passage that develops the theme of The Many Faces of Motherhood, Polly plainly reveals her lingering resentment of her mother, which stems from unmet emotional needs. The contrast between “standard-issue mother” and “role model” highlights Polly’s desire for a warmer, more intimate mother-daughter relationship rather than a mother who is famous and acclaimed. Her raw honesty and reflection expose what she thinks is the central conflict in her relationship with her mother, when in reality, there is much more to unearth.

“They remember the beginnings of their days, but their actual lives now are perpetual evening.”

Polly’s observation of the other memory care residents uses a temporal metaphor to emphasize mortality. Morning symbolizes youth, energy, and potential, while evening represents the waning of life and the inevitability of aging. This melancholic imagery reflects Polly’s growing awareness of mortality and change, particularly as she comes to grips with her father’s cognitive decline and the limitations of the human body.

“[T]he sun had started to go down outside the windows, so that the top half of my father was in shadow, as though dusk was swallowing him up, taking him over.”

Personification and visual imagery convey the encroaching effects of aging and illness on Polly’s father. The dusk, like dementia, gradually consumes his presence and identity. The imagery also reinforces Polly’s intimate awareness of her father’s feebleness. The somber tone mirrors her helpless observation and expression of her grief.

“The thing about living in New York City is that you feel either perpetually untethered or unwaveringly embedded.”

This line uses juxtaposition to capture the contradictory experience of life in New York City, which it uses as a metaphor for the tension between disconnection and belonging. The phrasing emphasizes extremes, in that urban life amplifies self-reflection and identity awareness. The chaos of living in the city parallels Polly’s interrogation of her place in the world, her relationships, her family, and her sense of purpose. Polly doesn’t feel isolated in the urban setting; instead, the community she and Mark have built there provides connection and support.

“I was paralyzed by the absurdity and the importance. Stayed paralyzed by it. Diagnosis as fortune-telling. Intuition as fate.”

This passage uses repetition and parallel structure to convey Polly’s stunned reaction to Barbara’s prediction. The phrasing compresses complex ideas into sharp, declarative fragments, which heightens the weight of Barbara’s warning. The mix of rational and mystical language relates to Polly’s exploration of uncertainty and the limits of control, especially of the human body. Polly struggles to process this intersection of life, illness, and friendship, as foreknowledge feels at once absurd and profound.

“[E]very time I started to think about some nice woman walking around in maternity clothes with our fetus inside, my mind did a sharp U-turn.”

Polly recoils viscerally at the idea of a surrogate carrying her child, not because she objects to the practice but because of how intensely personal and intimate pregnancy is to her. The discomfort in her reaction reveals her need to experience motherhood through her own body. This moment underscores how deeply her sense of self is tied to her fertility and her hopes for becoming a parent.

“I’ve been a certain kind of person, with a certain sort of idea of my future, for so long, virtually my entire life, that it’s as though I’m having to remake myself from the ground up.”

Josephine’s words capture the upheaval of shedding expectations that have defined her since childhood. She faces the difficult work of reconstructing her life now that she is no longer tethered to the version of herself her parents envisioned. The language conveys how the process, while disorientating, is full of possibility, highlighting that the cost of redefining one’s identity is well worth the reward. Josephine’s journey parallels Polly’s in that it comes at the cost of loss and disappointment yet brings hope for the future.

“It was like the shell was still there but it had been breached, riddled with tiny cracks, so that what was once my father was slowly seeping out of him, leaving him empty, the way I’d felt empty every time I discovered there was no baby.”

Polly sees both her father’s decline and her infertility as an emptying. The cracked shell imagery conveys how time and circumstance are eroding her sense of wholeness, both in her relationship to her father and within her own body. The parallel between her father’s emptiness and her own unfulfilled desires creates a symmetry that suggests she sees herself not as the next generation but the end.

“Maybe everyone’s mother was a kind of mystery to her daughter. Maybe everyone’s daughter was a mystery to her mother.”

The parallel structure (an instance of antimetabole, or the repetition of words in inverted order) emphasizes the mutual distance between mothers and daughters. In Polly and Mary’s relationship, especially, that misunderstanding goes both ways. The repetition of “mystery” softens Polly’s earlier judgments, as she shifts toward empathy and acceptance of their difficult relationship. Instead of seeing her relationship with her mother as uniquely flawed, she begins to see Mary as a human. It’s a realization rather than a dramatic breakthrough, as it doesn’t lead to an immediate reconciliation but marks a turning point in how Polly understands both her mother and herself.

“I’m afraid families are a funnel, and ours is running out.”

In her admission to Garrison, this metaphor captures Polly’s fear that her family line is narrowing and nearing its end. The image reflects Polly’s anxiety about infertility alongside her father’s decline, both contributing to the sense that her family is shrinking. Polly’s interrogation of identity and her journey with motherhood and infertility tie family to lineage and continuity, and she must reevaluate what constitutes a family and how to leave a legacy beyond offspring.

“You don’t know what’s happening behind the curtain.”

Lou’s saying uses a metaphor to denote that most people suffer in silence. The curtain imagery implies that people’s private struggles, untold histories, and decisions aren’t visible on the surface but still affect everything they say and do. Lou gently challenges Polly’s tendency to judge without knowing the full story. Every family has unseen complexities, and Lou pushes Polly toward a more compassionate, less certain understanding of others.

“The thing about family: Lots of times someone was doing something behind your back, for your own good, even when it didn’t feel that way.”

Sarah’s time with Lou and Skipper is a turning point in how Polly understands family. She’s starting to see that not everything kept from her is a betrayal; sometimes it’s protection. Watching Lou care for Sarah also broadens Polly’s idea of family beyond biology, showing how Lou steps into a nurturing role for both Sarah and Polly. Meanwhile, respecting Sarah’s wishes forces Polly to accept that love doesn’t always come on her terms.

“It’s hard to let yourself go when you feel as though you’re watching yourself, looking down from the corner of the ceiling.”

Trying to conceive made Polly feel detached from her own body, as if she were split into observer and participant. The analogy of watching herself from the ceiling suggests that intimacy feels clinical and distant instead of natural. She and Mark lost spontaneity, and she felt like she couldn’t fully be present in her own life. Polly’s experiences reinforce not only how infertility affects the body but also how it can fundamentally change how women experience connection.

“You walk along with this pain in your head, thinking about the things you know, the things you’ve discovered, the things you’ve lost, and all those things run around and around in your mind, like a stone in your shoe when you can’t stop walking.”

This passage uses a simile to describe how pain feels constant and inescapable, like something small that you can’t ignore, no matter how hard you try. The stone imagery portrays a low-grade, persistent discomfort that is never overwhelming enough to stop you, but always there. The repetition builds a sense of mental clutter, showing how Polly is stuck circling the same thoughts. Her grief and uncertainty linger and follow her through everyday life, feeling as though she carries everything at once without relief.

“[E]veryone needs to know where they come from. I don’t mean who they need to love, or cleave to, or follow. But having a mystery in your family tree can eat away at a person.”

Barbara draws a clear line between knowing about one’s family and belonging to one. Biology may not always lead to love, but not knowing her true roots could gnaw at Polly over time. Polly’s lack of proof has been unsettling. Barbara challenges Polly’s resistance by suggesting that answers, despite being painful, bring closure and assurance, even if it doesn’t end with Polly and Andre having a relationship.