47 pages • 1-hour read
Perfect Strangers
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Part 2, Chapters 14-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of mental illness, illness, child death, death, violence, sexual content, and cursing.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary
Olivia compares James’s erection to a steel pipe that’s 12 inches long. He orders her not to orgasm and explains the meaning of “edging” before he rips off her underwear and performs oral sex on her. James claims Olivia is his until she leaves in September, and she says she wants him to “own” her. He puts on a condom, and they have vaginal sex until they each have intense orgasms.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
Olivia is conflicted by her desire for a fling and a substantial relationship. She uses the word “dude” and reveals she’s from San Diego, but she can’t surf. James jokes that he learned “water skills” when he was a lifeguard at his community pool. Olivia is disappointed that James’s “water skills” didn’t come from a dramatic source.
Olivia and James tiptoe around personal issues while conceding their mutual infatuation with each other. When referring to his own history and secrets, James brings up the film The Matrix and claims Olivia would choose the blue pill (ignorance) over the red pill (the truth).
Kelly and Olivia discuss James on the phone, and Kelly suggests breaking into his apartment and searching his medicine cabinet. Olivia notes that she is on antidepressants, but Kelly claims Olivia’s medication isn’t a secret. She speculates that James could be a spy, a member of the mafia, or a person who escaped from a psychiatric hospital. By examining the building mailboxes, Olivia learns James’s last name. She gives it to Kelly because Kelly’s husband, who works for the FBI, can look into James.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Unable to write, Olivia cleans the apartment until Kelly calls. Her husband discovered James grew up in San Francisco and attended the Art Institute in Chicago, then the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. He has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). There’s no cure for ALS, which causes atrophied muscles and eventually, death, but James participates in clinical trials. Olivia feels guilty and wonders if she should tell James that she knows. Kelly believes Olivia should stay quiet.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
Chris calls Olivia, who immediately recognizes his New England, elitist voice. She also notices an “edge,” and he claims that Olivia is still his wife, despite the divorce. He notes that he, too, lost Emerson. Olivia reflects that she doesn’t hate Chris—without him, she couldn’t have had Emerson.
After Olivia hangs up, she has drinks with Edmond. She cries and falls asleep. When she wakes up, James is in the apartment. He wishes Olivia could talk to him about her issues. Olivia believes James is a “gift,” and she confirms that she belongs to James until September.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary
James carries Olivia into the bathroom. He makes a joke about Hemingway, and Olivia calls him “primitive.” As they have sex in the shower, James declares that they’ll live each day to the fullest until September, and Olivia reflects on what she knows about his ALS.
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary
Olivia has a dream that involves war and James providing a safe home. She wakes up alone, but James has left a note that advises her to document what she feels. Olivia fills yellow pads with her emotions and thoughts, then scans the pages and sends them to Estelle.
Estelle praises the writing but is wary of Olivia publishing erotica since her readers are mostly “smart” and “educated” women. Olivia reminds Estelle of the acclaimed men who’ve published sexually explicit books. She also notes the popularity of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Nevertheless, Estelle wants Olivia to use a pseudonym. Olivia already has a title, Until September.
Olivia calls James, but he doesn’t answer and doesn’t have voicemail. She goes out and has a sumptuous dinner by herself. When she returns to the apartment, Chris and James are both there.
Part 2, Chapter 20 Summary
Chris flew to Paris after their phone call, wanting to know that Olivia was safe. James claims Olivia is safer with him. It seems to Olivia that Chris and James have met before. They deny knowing each other, but Olivia thinks they’re lying. Chris and James exchange insults and threats, reminding Olivia of “apes.” She promises to have lunch with Chris tomorrow, so he leaves.
Olivia wonders if James would’ve killed Chris—with his fourth-degree black belt in Krav Maga (a fighting system that centers on reacting to real threats), he could’ve. Olivia admits to James that Chris triggers unpleasant memories.
Part 2, Chapters 14-20 Analysis
The novel’s revelation that James has ALS shifts the narrative into a more serious place in Part 2, subverting romance genre conventions and the established tone of the narrative. The discovery ostensibly explains James’s suspicious behavior, including his sudden trip to Germany and the emergency phone call at the restaurant. At the same time, the narrative hints at his ALS as a red herring, or a false clue, introducing elements of the mystery genre into the story. Olivia hints at this with her uncertainty about James’s ALS, asking, “How can a dying man be so strong?” (322). Although ALS’s manifestations aren’t so easily categorized, especially in its early stages, her question reframes James’s revelation as not an answer but a cause for more questions. Her blunt question also suggests that ALS is a convenient cover for a problematic truth, a conclusion supported by the contentious meeting between James and Chris, after which she states, “Both of them are lying” (344). Her feeling that James is lying twists the novel’s treatment of the theme of The Pleasure of Mystery by introducing the first negative feelings Olivia has about James’s mystery
Truths about Olivia are revealed in this section as well, as Geissinger peels back the romantic façade of both characters to reveal three-dimensional characters with histories. Using a playful tone, Kelly and Olivia make light of Olivia’s past mental health issues: When Olivia says, “So that’s how you found out I was on anti-depressants,” Kelly replies, “Oh, hon, that was no state secret. You went from walking around like a zombie to walking around like…well, like a medicated zombie” (272). With these exchanges, the narrative reveals that Olivia’s traumatic past necessitated medical treatment. The jocular exchange makes the anti-depressants seem like an unimportant secret—it wasn’t a big deal—but Olivia only shares part of the mystery. As with James’s ALS, Olivia’s past mental health condition creates further questions and mystery—Olivia, too, is “lying.”
James further develops the novel’s exploration of Shaping Reality Through Storytelling when, in a note, he tells Oliva, “Write down what you feel. Everything you feel—about Paris, about life, about me—from now until September” (326). Olivia obeys and creates a story that directly links to her experiences with James. The implication is that Olivia seamlessly incorporates her reality into the novel. The title, Until September, cements the relationship, as it circles back to the phrase in James’s note. Estelle, however, insists on maintaining a separation between Olivia’s real life and her book. Estelle refers to it as a “manuscript” that exists separately from Olivia. Olivia isn’t the manuscript, nor is the manuscript Olivia. More so, Estelle insists that Olivia use a pen name. The use of a different name generates further separation between Olivia, the person, and Olivia, the author.
Estelle’s dialogue with Olivia over the pen name and manuscript also opens a frank discussion of genre in the narrative. Estelle labels the manuscript “erotica,” which she believes qualifies as a putdown. Olivia replies, “It’s not erotica. It’s a story about two strangers falling in love” (334), and her rejection of the “erotica” label reinforces Estelle’s perspective on the genre. Olivia, too, sees erotica as inferior, but she claims she’s not writing erotica. She sees herself as working within the tradition established by writers like John Updike and Phillip Roth, who published highly sexual books that people viewed as “literature.” The debate suggests that Olivia wants people to read her story as literature, and it links to Geissinger’s warning that she’s writing “literary fiction,” introducing a metafictional connection to the author’s own comments.
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