Pictures of You

“I do feel safe at sixteen. I have parents who adore me. A best friend who sticks to my side like glue. I have goals and plans and meticulously documented dreams, none of which include waking up thirteen years later with dark hair, posh glasses, and a huge phone, totally isolated from everything in the entire world that ever mattered to me.”

This immediate contrast between Evie now and Evie then creates the central mystery that Evie will work to resolve. Given Evie’s lack of memories, which would provide the logical narrative explaining how she ended up where she is, the novel asks what elements constitute our core identity. The experiences of various primary and secondary characters answer this question in different ways.

“It’s just me: Evie Hudson. Fish out of water in a dimension where I’ve signed up for everything in life that I categorically oppose and totally lost track of my own narrative.”

This metaphor of a fish out of water demonstrates Evie’s sense of dissonance at waking up in a life she doesn’t recognize, which provides her character conflict and arc for the present-day timeline. The reference to a narrative points to the theme of Language and Story as Building Blocks of Identity. Evie wants a life that has its own dramatic arc, conflict, and character development, just like a novel. Evie’s amnesia allows her to look at her adult life from the perspective of her 16-year-old self, and she wonders how she lost authorship of her own story. The humorous tone that pervades the beginning chapters turns somber as Evie learns the emotional gravity of the experiences she’s blocked from her mind.

“Every atom is my body is dislodged. I’m disassembled into billions of microscopic pieces, none of which add up to a life I know, or even like. And I’m totally alone.”

This image captures Evie’s increasing sense of dissonance and character conflict as she learns more about her present-day life that is at odds with what her 16-year-old self wanted. The metaphor of being disassembled suggests Evie is on a quest to put herself back together, and this means identifying and reclaiming pieces of herself she lost or alienated, like all the dreams she sacrificed for Oliver. The declaration that she is alone is ironic because Drew is with her, and he will prove to be one of the most essential pieces of the life she wants.

“All those dots will lead to Oliver. Once she met him, he filled almost every moment of her waking consciousness […] She was supporting actor to his leading role. It was a miscasting right from the start, in my opinion.”

The alternating narrative points of view initially add tension and suspense as Drew hints at knowledge that Evie and the reader do not yet have. Drew’s assumption that Evie’s quest for her memory will lead her to Oliver foreshadows the way Oliver will play the role of antagonist—the one who sent Evie’s life off its planned track. The image of miscasting gains resonance later when Evie and those she loves confirm that Drew should have been cast as the leading man in her romance from the start.

“Underwater, there’s a boy—perfect face and blond hair floodlit, blue eyes fixed on mine as we ricochet off each other and time stands still. Just for a second or two, but long enough for me to lose myself in his attention.”

The unusual circumstances of their first meeting—underwater in the pool—amplifies the significance of this moment for Evie as it’s outside a conventional setting. Oliver seems almost otherworldly to her, and the idiomatic expression “lose myself” foreshadows her gradual loss of identity and agency under his manipulative and controlling influence.

“It would be so easy for someone to pull gently at the threads of my life and unravel everything. They’d see how bad things are, not sleeping, coming home from school with my heart in my mouth, holding my breath as I unlatch the flimsy back door with holes all through the fly screen—symbolic of our life, really—wondering what I’m going to find.”

Drew’s fears for his mother’s health present a main source of internal conflict for him, providing, along with Evie, another source of attachment that causes him pain. His fear at the state he’ll find his mother in foreshadows the scene where he finds she has passed away, while the screen door, pointed to as a symbol of their life, shows that they are both struggling for financial as well as emotional security. This guardedness toward letting other people see or unravel him is a key aspect of Drew’s character.

“There’s something about Oliver that feels inevitable, so much energy between us I literally have to catch my breath. Between how he looks and all the attention he’s paying me, after I’ve been totally starved of romance my entire school career, he’s irresistible.”

Descriptions about her feelings for Oliver depict Evie as feeling some level of discomfort from the start, but the intensity of her attraction stems from her vulnerability in not having any previous basis for romantic experiences. She writes Oliver into her narrative about grand romance from the start and then strives to live up to those expectations, speaking to the novel’s theme of Language and Story as Building Blocks of Identity.

“I want to tell him I love him too. I really want to. I should. It must be true […] His leg pins mine again, the weight of it heavier this time as he looks into my eyes with a silent intensity. I try to push back but can’t, panic flooding my chest until I open my mouth and say the three little words he’s expecting. And the pressure from his leg instantly lifts.”

This moment early in their dating relationship is the reader’s first red flag—and Evie’s—that Oliver intends to coerce and manipulate her. The weight of his leg symbolizes the ways he will both physically and emotionally smother and control her.

“You spend years getting over something—a betrayal—and rebuild your life, thinking it will never implode again, because you’ll never allow it to.”

While most of the novel is told in alternating first-person point of view, moving between Drew and Evie, there are occasional moments of internal monologue when the narrator assumes the second-person voice. This seems a direct address to the reader—“you”—but really works to allow the narrator to reflect on their own experience with an extra layer of distance, as here, when Drew grapples with how to tell amnesiac Evie what happened in their relationship.

“I feel like we’re at risk of her memory snapping into focus at any moment, and then we’ll lose this version of Evie all over again. The first time nearly destroyed me.”

Evie’s memory loss is explained as dissociative amnesia, a medical condition in which her mind is attempting to shield her from traumatic memories. Drew’s conflict about forcing her to confront those memories before she—or he—is ready allows for narrative deferral and suspense, holding off moments of revelation in the present-day timeline that are instead revealed by the flashbacks.

“All around us, the water lights up in eddies and swirls, as if we’re in an otherworldly animated movie or living on some distant, undiscovered planet. I spin, trailing my fingers through the water, light swirling all around me.”

Finding the bioluminescence in Jervis Bay provides an enchanted moment for young Drew and Evie, one that confirms how special their relationship is. This shared experience of wonder becomes a symbol for the youthful connection that both wish to reclaim.

“There’s a tiny silver fingerprint pendant hanging beside a microscope and a strand of DNA. This is a million times better than some sort of gemstone. It represents the future I want to create. And the fact that he knows this about me—and how much it matters to me.”

The forensics necklace Oliver brings Evie from his trip to Europe demonstrates, to her, that he is attentive to her preferences and supports her passion. She takes these indications as signs that he is indeed a perfect boyfriend, not seeing these gifts as Oliver’s method of manipulating his own image or her attachment to him. Evie’s interest in forensics turns out to be more than a character quirk, as her abilities allow her to solve a real crime.

“I’m crying in front of the Trevi Fountain in the heat of the Italian sun, under perfect blue skies, with the perfect boyfriend. Miserable. I sold out on our gap-year dream.”

Oliver’s rewriting of Evie’s gap-year plans to include him instead of Bree is another instance of coercion. Evie, however, blames herself for feeling miserable in this quintessentially romantic setting in Rome, pointing to the many ways she misinterprets or excuses his behavior. The symbolism of Trevi Fountain as being connected with wishes reveals that Evie’s true desire is to feel safe and happy with her friend, but she sacrifices this, too, to try to fit the narrative of a grand romance with Oliver.

“I have to commit to the path I know I deserve. Not this half-life, endlessly looking over my shoulder, hoping the future I imagined will catch up with the present and bowl everything over.”

Drew’s character arc in the present-day timeline presents him with the same conflict that Evie increasingly feels in the flashbacks: the wish to escape a half-life for a full one. Both characters express a longing to return to a previous state, a longing satisfied by their reconciliation at the end.

“I was always scrambling to rebalance [our relationship]. Forever adjusting the light. And when I inevitably failed, it felt like me who was wrong, or confused or crazy—while all along it was him. He was the artist. And now I’ve caught him here, with the camera in his hand, blaming his tools.”

In this moment at the restaurant when she breaks off her engagement to Oliver, Evie uses the metaphor of a photographer to characterize how Oliver has tried to control her self-image and the narrative of their relationship. The comparison contrasts Oliver, as the less skilled photographer, to Drew, who is in some ways the impetus for this break as he’s reminded Evie of her old self and the life she wanted. Ironically, Evie’s bid for freedom and self-reclamation will be ruthlessly curtailed as Oliver’s strategies of coercion escalate.

“Until tonight, I hadn’t known how severely I missed Drew, and how quickly he steadies me. It’s like coming home and meeting an earlier version of myself. One I liked more.”

Evie’s moment of comfort and safety with Drew at age 23 confirms which relationship is better for her and echoes the feelings she’s developing for him in the present-day timeline. The idea of meeting a younger, more likeable version of herself ironically reflects what 29-year-old Evie has been doing by going back in her mind to her 16-year-old self. This moment of recognition anticipates the ending, when Evie realizes how important Drew has been to her earlier self as well.

“I’ve been Oliver’s everything since we fell into the swimming pool. But I think I’ve been drowning every moment since. Every time I try to clamber to the surface, he finds a way to pull me back under.”

This metaphor of drowning captures how Evie has felt increasingly suffocated in her relationship with Oliver, emphasizing the sense that she’s losing herself. The passage serves as foreshadowing, as Oliver, to prevent Evie from being with Drew at his mother’s funeral, will force her to make a choice that pulls her into the relationship again, even though she no longer loves him.

“I can sense the schoolboy I must have known. And the adolescent. Tangible memories try to push forward, for a friendship I remember only in glimpses. But even without distinct evidence, I increasingly trust this connection.”

Evie’s sense of connection to Drew even in her amnesiac state suggests how deep her feelings for him run. Answering the novel’s question about what constitutes our core self, the importance of this relationship, and its ability to break through her self-protective amnesia, suggests that our deepest and most nurturing relationships define us, and those attachments persist.

“So I chose Oliver. Again. And again, and again, and again. At every instance surrendering another piece of myself I could never get back.”

Whereas when she was young and in love and adjusting herself to be what Oliver wanted, Evie, after she concedes to Oliver to prevent his harming himself, sees herself as consciously chipping away at herself in a slow and relentless process of erosion. This mirrors her image of herself being disassembled earlier, though for different reasons, while the sense of being diminished illustrates both the mechanisms of and consequences to Oliver’s type of emotional abuse.

“There are few things in life that have brought me more pride over the years than my blond-haired, young, clever boy.”

Anderson Roche’s speech at Oliver and Evie’s wedding is significant in many respects. It confirms how he always favored Oliver over Drew, cherishing one boy while ignoring the other, undermining Drew and Annie for Oliver’s benefit. At the same time his claim of pride rings false because their interactions have shown that Oliver never felt loved or supported by his father. Most importantly, the phrasing of the adjectives as he describes Oliver is a speech pattern that Evie recognizes as unusual and which gives Anderson away as the author of both Annie’s supposed suicide note and the letter blackmailing Evie to abandon her PhD research.

“I could just draw a line in the sand and start from here. I could see out the rest of life as an incomplete jigsaw puzzle with the scary pieces lost. Like one of those cracked Japanese vases with the broken bits filled with gold.”

When Evie sees her wedding video and recognizes the link between Anderson’s speech and Annie’s suicide note, this internal monologue reflects the crucial decision she has to make, one that will be important for her character arc. The image of the sand as the new starting point for her life illustrates how she’s thinking of her life as a narrative, one that she wants to rewrite. The reference to the Japanese art of kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer—suggests that the innocence of not knowing would be a beautiful improvement, gold holding together the broken pieces of her.

“It was microwounds, inflicted over several years, always on top of scars that hadn’t yet healed.”

Drew’s image of small, tiny, continuing wounds captures the pattern of Oliver’s emotional abuse of Evie, how he isolated her and pulled her away from her work, her friends, and her family. But this passage could equally be describing the abuse that Evie in turn inflicted on the people she loved, hurting her parents and Bree over and over, along with Drew.

“These are pictures of you, Evie, before your large life closed in. Before it folded in on itself, and then folded in again, over and over, until your dreams ran out of oxygen. Pictures of the woman you could be again.”

Drew’s personal exhibit named Pictures of You becomes a retrospective of his relationship with Evie and his perspective on her life. The image of the many folds that have diminished and suffocated her reflects his belief about Oliver’s influence on her dreams, her ambitions, herself. Seeing these images—herself through Drew’s eyes—makes Evie resolve to get her own self back, even before the accident and the amnesia.