Once and Again
58 pages • 1-hour read
Rebecca SerleOnce and Again
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Content Warning: This section of the guide references infertility and pregnancy loss, sexual content, antisemitism, violence, and illness or death.
The Illusory Nature of Second Chances
In Once and Again, Serle uses an element of magical realism—the silver ticket that offers a single do‑over to change a past mistake—to explore the complex nature of second chances. At first, the women in Lauren’s family each view the ticket as a gift, yet the narrative steadily nuances that idea away, positioning the chance at a do-over as both a blessing and a curse. Serle’s story suggests that a second chance doesn’t erase pain or guarantee happiness. It often trades one kind of suffering for another and creates consequences that echo through a lifetime. By following three generations of Novak women, the novel anchors this thematic exploration in personal choices. When Marcella and Lauren use their tickets, they each experience new anxieties and unforeseen difficulties, while Sylvia gives hers to Lauren with a quiet contentment at the end of her life.
Dave’s heart condition raises the narrative stakes of Marcella’s choice to save Lauren’s life. Knowing her husband has a potentially fatal heart defect, she secretly uses her ticket to save Lauren from a fatal car accident, relying on the idea that Lauren still has a ticket to use to save Dave should the need arise. Despite this reassurance, Marcella’s life becomes defined by the loss of her ticket. She becomes painfully aware that she’s powerless to stop whatever other problems may come. The dread of disaster impacts her posture toward her family, turning her into a watchful parent and spouse who can never relax or trust the future. Saving her daughter doesn’t erase the trauma Marcella experienced when she died, forcing her to live with a constant background hum of grief reshaped into anxiety about the losses she’s now unable to prevent.
Lauren’s arc deepens this theme, showing that erasing a mistake does not equate to confronting it. Wracked with guilt after she cheats on her husband, Leo, Lauren reacts quickly and uses her ticket to erase the affair. She notes, “What happened is gone, and so is my ticket” (150). At first, she feels steadier, recommitting to Leo and rebuilding their life together. However, her father Dave’s heart attack leaves her facing a crisis without the ability to change it—forcing her to confront what it truly means to live with the consequences of the past. Dave’s perspective shifts her understanding: When Sylvia offers Lauren her own unused ticket to save Dave, he refuses, saying “I don’t want to take it back [...] I loved my life” (220). When Lauren asks why they couldn’t love it a second time, Dave responds: “You wouldn’t have Leo” (220), making clear that changing the past has irrevocable consequences for the present. It is this realization that transforms Lauren. Rather than reaching for another erasure, she chooses to reveal her mistake to Leo herself—placing value on honesty, vulnerability, and genuine connection over the illusion of a picture-perfect life.
Sylvia’s approach—leaving her ticket unused for more than 90 years—allows her to accept life’s joys and heartbreaks as they come. The reveal that she’s never used her ticket reinforces the idea that the pain of life is inextricably tied to its joy. Erasing the pain of the past leaves one vulnerable to new sorrows, complicating the idea of a second chance as a clean slate. As Sylvia explains to Lauren, “Life moved only forward… I didn’t want to tamper with it” (213). Serle roots Sylvia’s restraint in her belief that altering the past will not produce a flawless present. By living with her decisions, she’s remained present in all the seasons of her life, both painful and joyful—a contentment Marcella struggles to achieve. Sylvia’s final gift of the unused ticket to Lauren acts as a kind of reckoning—pushing Lauren to choose between erasing her family’s pain in the present or cherishing the joy of their past—a past that defines the life they’ve built together.
Intergenerational Inheritance of Trauma and Strength
By evoking the perspectives of four generations of Novak women, Serle illustrates the ways both trauma and strength are passed down from mother to daughter. The silver ticket each woman receives at birth becomes a concrete reminder of a family legacy shaped by trauma, endurance, and the weight of love, care, and survival. The tickets tie each woman to the sacrifices that came before her and the burdens that lie ahead, emphasizing the obstacles and difficulties of the past and the strength it took to overcome them. The multi-perspective structure highlights the shared weight that binds the family as tightly as their love, creating a lineage marked by resilience as well as pain.
Irina’s early experience in 1920s Odessa anchors this legacy in historical trauma. As a young girl facing anti‑Jewish pogroms, Irina is “young enough to believe in magic, but old enough to have experienced the realities of war” (11-12). When she uses her ticket to save her father from capture at the hands of Bolshevik forces, her choice reveals the ticket’s double nature. It grants a miracle, yet Irina still carries the fear and devastation she experienced when her father was first taken—the memory of the loss narrowly avoided. The event disappears, but the original trauma remains. This will to survive, and the terror of losing loved ones, is passed down through the generations of the Novak family. Each woman inherits the ability to undo a choice along with the emotional burden of the family’s past.
The ticket itself functions as a symbol of intergenerational inheritance, representing the strength of familial bonds and their shared burden. Marcella’s decision to lie about her use—claiming she saved her husband instead of her daughter—is motivated by a desire to protect her daughter from pain and confusion, yet she inadvertently passes the trauma she carries from losing Lauren and the fear that she won’t be able to protect Dave down to her daughter. As Lauren notes, “I felt her grief move out of her and into me like a kind of virus, infecting everything in spit distance. I understood her grief and pain and terror—because somehow it was mine, too. I could see that it connected us and would connect us from now on” (23). This revelation reframes the ticket as a link in a chain of maternal pain, sacrifice, and love.
In the novel’s conclusion, Lauren defines the legacy of the women in her family by their shared need to protect those they love. When Lauren learns that Marcella used her ticket to save Lauren’s life, she finally sees their connection clearly: “She folds into me, and I hold her […] And it’s there in the passage—mother and child, child and mother, grief and love and love and grief […] that I finally understand the legacy I come from. We are saviors” (203). The family secret tethers the Novak women, shaping their identities and their understanding of responsibility.
The Tension Between Control and Acceptance
The magical “do-over” premise of Once and Again centers the tension between the fantasy of control—the urge to reshape fate and wipe out past wounds—and acceptance as a path to healing. Serle’s novel sees her characters grappling with that tension and discovering that the need to control their fates ultimately perpetuates anxiety. Acceptance—even when it involves loss—allows Lauren, Marcella, and Sylvia to embrace joy alongside the pain in their lives. Through their struggles with mortality, infertility, and grief, the characters each try to seize control before they learn to live with what they cannot change.
The magic tickets provide the characters with a limited mechanism for control in their lives. When Marcella is faced with the reality of Lauren’s accident, the allure of taking back control and reversing the devastating situation takes hold of her: “She can feel the edges of this reality folding in, the softness of this hard-boiled hope […] There is relief—puddles and pools of it. Relief that she has avoided tragedy” (53-56). Yet the aftermath of the reversal leaves Marcella with sharper fear. She has used her single opportunity to control her past and this attempt to manage one disaster exposes her inability to stop any future one: “The days and weeks after the accident are euphoric—Marcella has done it, she has successfully taken it back—but once the shock wears off she is left with a low-simmer depression that turns, in a matter of hours, into a boil” (158). Years later when Lauren uses her ticket to wipe away her affair with Stone, Lauren feels a similar euphoria and relief, but her sense of control falls apart when her father’s heart fails and she cannot help him. Her choice to reshape one moment of her personal life opens the door to a loss she cannot prevent.
Lauren and Leo’s infertility journey represents a struggle entirely outside of their control—one that even the ticket can’t solve. They try every medical option, from IUI to IVF, hoping these interventions will produce a pregnancy. The process wears them down emotionally and financially as every attempt fails. At the height of their argument over whether to continue fertility treatments, Leo confesses the pain and exhaustion he feels in the process, and Lauren tells him, “We can’t control it […] That’s the point” (50). Leo counters by framing acceptance and intentionality as a form of control: “‘Yes, we can,’” he says. His head falls into his hands when he says what he does next. ‘We can just stop’” (50). Lauren’s choice to embrace this idea acts as a turning point in her arc, moving her toward a steadier happiness in the family she already has.
Sylvia’s choice to never use her ticket, and to ultimately pass it to Lauren, represents a new kind of inheritance: the wisdom of acceptance over the fraught desire for control. Realizing what she could potentially lose if she tries to erase Bobby’s death, Sylvia puts “the ticket in a lockbox under [her] bed and swore that [she] would never use it, that with every new and painful turn [she’d] remember [her] child, this product of marching forward, and [she] would let time continue to unfold” (207). Similarly, Dave’s refusal to use Sylvia’s gifted ticket to change his own fate frames the acceptance of life’s pain and loss as necessary to the experience of joy. As Dave insists, “I don’t want to take it back. I loved that decade. I loved my life” (220). By accepting his experience instead of rewriting it, Dave affirms the value of the life he’s lived and frees Lauren to do the same.
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