The play frames Diana’s mental illness as an obstruction to what the family regards as “normalcy” or stability. The first time the play exposes Diana’s illness as she is preparing meals for the family, Dan’s immediate resolution is to take Diana to Doctor Fine, as though the incident is a sign that Diana’s illness has reached a threshold point that neither he nor Natalie are equipped to address. From that moment on, the play tracks Diana’s trials with several medication regimens, which end when Diana stops experiencing her emotions. Doctor Fine calls Diana “stable” at this point while Dan celebrates the absence of any emergency in their household as a sign that things are turning out better. However, the persisting tensions within the family unit reveal the illusion of family “normalcy.”

The juxtaposition of the family’s treatment of Diana before and after her medication trials suggests that Dan and Natalie aspire to a family life that doesn’t have to reckon with the reality of Diana’s illness. This aspiration is based on the presumption that every family is entitled to live a “normal” life, as Natalie wonders in “Just Another Day”: “So it’s times like these I wonder how I take it / And if other fam’lies live the way we do— / If they love each other, or if they just fake it / And if other daughters feel like I feel, too” (9). Natalie’s perception of her fraught family life clashes with Diana’s perception of her “perfect” family: “We’re the perfect loving fam’ly / If they say we’re not, then fuck ’em” (14). For Diana, “normalcy” is something they can achieve given the present circumstances of their family. For Natalie and Dan, it is the other way around: They need to address the issue of Diana’s mental illness before they can convince themselves that their family is “normal.”

Their motivation leads directly into their resolution at the end of Act I, which sees Diana undergoing a form of treatment that causes her to lose the memories that trigger her mental illness. Dan and Natalie’s differing responses to Diana’s memory loss challenge the condition of family “normalcy” in different ways. Whereas Natalie registers the upsetting quality of Diana’s side effects, Dan leverages her memory loss as an opportunity to steer Diana towards believing in his standard of “normalcy.” He tries helping her to remember the things he wants her to remember, like the early days of their relationship and Natalie’s early life, but avoids anything that evokes the trauma of losing Gabe. Throughout Act II, it becomes clear that Diana’s trauma goes deeper than her memories, and when she finally recalls Gabe, Dan’s first instinct is to resume her electroconvulsive treatment.

Diana resolves the tension created by her family’s aspiration to “normalcy” by allowing Dan and Natalie to pursue lives where they don’t have to feel burdened by the reality of her mental illness. After Diana tells Natalie that she needs to prioritize her happiness over Diana’s comfort, Natalie acknowledges that it is impossible to strive towards a “normal” life, but that she can also be happy with a life that approximates it: “But something . . . next to normal / Would be okay” (94). The lines that give the play its title signal the play’s assertion that while “normalcy” might be an artificial construct, each of the family members can strive towards making life feel as “normal” as it can be for each other.