Our Last Resort

“In the beginning, there was Émile.”

The biblical cadence of this line mimics Genesis, casting Émile in the role of a false deity. He was a self-styled genius and prophet, and he dictated every aspect of the cult members’ lives. Gabriel and Frida experienced the cult as childhood trauma and continue to struggle with the consequences of their upbringing for the entirety of their adult lives.

“Gabriel cracks open a bottle of water from the minibar. After a couple of gulps, he hands it to me. I could have my own, the minibar is complimentary. Anytime we step out, it refills by magic. But there are habits you can’t rewrite. We didn’t have enough to eat, for so many years, and so we live like this.”

Gabriel and Frida formed a close bond during their time in the cult and see one another as siblings. The habits they formed in childhood prove difficult to break, and even after they lose touch and reconnect, they find that their relationship takes the same shape that it did when they were young. These lines juxtapose the abundance of their adult lives with the scarcity of their past, when they were forced to share everything.

“Here’s how life worked in Émile’s world: You were born, children were cared for collectively by the women. You never belonged to your mother or to your father. Émile demanded total detachment. ‘The family unit is a source of great corruption,’ was one of his common refrains.”

The artificial lack of family that the cult creates is one of Gabriel and Frida’s greatest sources of childhood trauma. Until they find each other, they both feel alone and adrift in the often violent world of Émile’s cult. Even after they develop a strong, “sibling” bond, Gabriel and Frida struggle with the aftereffects of being raised without parental love.

“It’s amazing the cruelty you can coax out of people if you convince them they are doing the right thing.”

This line condenses the novel’s critique of moral rationalization. Frida is speaking about how parents in the cult willingly gave up their children and watch them grow up in a communal group. While Émile argued that this parenting model was less prone to “corruption,” it encouraged the parents to engage in cruelty that adversely impacted their children and themselves. Frida holds Émile and his followers responsible for these harmful decisions.

“The Romans got to Gabriel’s psyche first, and once they did they never let go.”

Gabriel’s interest in Roman history and mythology is, he claims, rooted in its historical depictions of family. It highlights his attempts at Reclaiming Identity in the Aftermath of Abuse. He is particularly drawn to the tale of Romulus and Remus, the orphaned infants raised by a wolf who grow up to found Rome. This story appeals to him in large part because of its depiction of orphans. He hopes that, like Romulus and Remus, he can put his trauma behind him and achieve success in his adult life.

“Who cared what he planned on teaching me? I was safe. I had money. Nothing else mattered.”

Frida’s short, declarative sentences convey her focus as she celebrates her first moment of agency. She decides that safety and money matter more than her allegiance to the cult or its leader, marking her shift from submission. Years later, she will trace her freedom back to this moment when she stole money from Émile.

“Gabriel doesn’t drink. Per my count, he’s been sober for 8 years.”

Both Gabriel and Frida carry their childhood trauma into adulthood. In Gabriel’s case, it leads to depression and alcohol abuse. Frida is vigilant about this, and her lines reveal her care for him as she keeps careful tabs on Gabriel’s sobriety.

“All I craved when I met Gabriel was a sibling.”

Gabriel and Frida form a chosen family when they are children, and they remain bonded for life. Their relationship is complex and not without difficulty, but each becomes a support system for the other. Since they were robbed of a traditional family structure, their sibling bond is very important to both of them.

“We learned to optimize our trips. As soon as Émile’s world was out of sight, we ran.”

Gabriel and Frida leave the cult in stages. They first work up the courage to sneak out for brief outings, and then their trips become longer. Ultimately, they leave for good. The phrase “Émile’s world” casts the cult as a self-contained reality that is completely different from the outside world they escape to.

“All Gabriel ever wanted to be was blameless, pure.”

Gabriel and Frida differ in a few key ways. One is that Frida is more comfortable with moral relativism. She is willing to take extreme steps in order to protect herself and her loved ones. Gabriel, at least when he is younger, is motivated by the desire to be good and to follow the cult rules.

“Joan taught us gently, one glass of soda at a time, that the outside world didn’t have to be scary, that there were wonders awaiting us.”

In Gabriel and Frida’s explorations of the neighboring town, they meet a bartender who offers them free food and soda. The soda symbolizes ordinary pleasure as well as the generosity of strangers, and it helps the children to lose the fear they have of the world outside of their compound. This becomes a key step on their journey to freedom.

“Gabriel has never verbalized it before, but I’ve intuited it for years, his resentment that I took to the real world much more easily than he ever did, that I made it work for me and he kept bumping into its walls.”

Although Gabriel and Frida are deeply bonded, their relationship is complex and not without difficulty. They have different responses to freedom after their years of subordination in the cult, and they are not always aligned in the way that they manage their new lives. Frida is able to achieve career success, and because of this, a distance grows between the two. Gabriel, on the other hand, drifts into work that is fulfilling but not lucrative and feels constrained by this.

“That’s something I’m still ashamed of, that I taught his classes, that I shared his word.”

Frida feels that she is complicit in the damage that the cult did to its other members. She is ashamed that she vocalized Émile’s ideology. This complicity is part of the complex trauma of her childhood.

“Émile taught us that we were the menace, that the world had to be protected from us, but this whole time, we were the chicks.”

In this scene, Émile has just raped Frida for the first time, and she realizes that his entire philosophy is a sham. He started the cult to have a ready supply of women to prey upon. She recalls a video he showed her to deter her from eating meat in which baby chicks are fed live into a grinder. She realizes that she has always been intended to be Émile’s target, just like all of the other women in the cult, and she likens them to the chicks bred for slaughter.

“Gabriel has depression and I have this incessant need for order, this panicked part of myself that calms down when surfaces are clean, and every item has its spot.”

These lines present the persistence of trauma through the different ways that Gabriel and Frida respond to it. Gabriel experiences depression, but Frida’s trauma manifests as anxiety. While Gabriel often lacks motivation, Frida becomes fixated on to-do lists as a way to soothe her panic and re-orient her energy and attention away from her racing thoughts.

“It scared me first, the idea of intimacy, of partners.”

This line highlights the persistence of trauma as Frida struggles with intimacy after leaving the cult. As she explores sex, dating, and relationships, she sets clear boundaries for herself and never becomes too emotionally invested in the men she spends time with. In this way, she begins to move past the trauma of Émile’s assault. Establishing herself as a person with agency and self-determination is a key step on her post-trauma identity journey.

“There was an unspoken rule between us: We didn’t force each other to process things faster than we were able to.”

Frida and Gabriel formed an exceptionally close bond during their traumatic childhood and understand each other very well. Even in early adulthood, each forms the other’s sole support system. They allow each other to process trauma at their own pace because of their deep understanding and empathy.

“We fixed ourselves, one body part at a time.”

The days and months that follow Gabriel and Frida’s move to New York become a period of rebuilding. They re-orient themselves toward society, find work and go to school, learn how to form healthy relationships, establish new identities, and address the many physical and mental health issues that had gone untreated for the entirety of their lives. This process helps each of them to find agency and self-determination and to begin to move beyond their trauma.

“There’s something brave and resilient about her. Someone who social climbed but never forgot where she came from.”

Sabrina is a complex character who has much more depth than immediately apparent. She remains down-to-earth even after she married into tremendous wealth and never forgets her origins, just like Frida and Gabriel. The descriptors “brave” and “resilient” also suggest that she is a survivor, just like them.

“Annie did what she wanted to do, however she wanted to do it.”

Annie is a complex character whom Frida initially idolizes but eventually comes to see as difficult and intractable. Both Gabriel and Frida sour on Annie despite their early affinity for her, and the fault is almost entirely Annie’s. It is her lack of generosity and empathy that ruins both her marriage and her friendship with Frida.

“What I did to Annie flooded my psyche like water on a sinking ship.”

The simile Frida uses likens guilt to perceiving slow-moving disaster. The word “flooded” conveys that she is overwhelmed, and the simile suggests that she will ultimately drown from guilt. Her decision to kill Annie to protect Gabriel crystallizes the theme of The Moral Complexities of Unconditional Devotion.

“Even my thing with the mob show, I liked it well enough before Annie’s death, but after? I needed the mobsters, all of them well dressed, human. So many of them murderers, they killed one another, killed people they loved, killed their own friends, their own relatives. They buried bodies, dismembered them. And then? Then they went on with it, went home to their families.”

Frida is drawn to a TV show about organized crime because it helps her to think through the aftermath of Annie’s murder and helps her to deal with what she’s done. The repetition of the word “killed” emphasizes her obsession with her act of killing Annie. She struggles even though she feels that she acted in Gabriel’s best interest. The show depicts mobsters who commit brutal crimes and then return home to their families, and this helps Frida to accept that she can move past the killing and resume her normal life.

“I’ve lost enough people.”

Gabriel feels loss more acutely than Frida does. She is sure that she wants to leave the cult in large part because of her sexual assault. Gabriel, although furious with Émile and desirous of freedom, has a more complicated relationship to the cult and misses aspects of their old lives once they leave. He is also more devoted to Annie than Frida and more willing to forgive her many faults and character flaws.