55 pages • 1-hour read
Pictures of You
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Themes
The Insidious Nature of Emotional Abuse
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of emotional abuse, suicidal ideation, and death.
Grey shares in the Author’s Note that her daughter’s research on coercive control inspired her fictional representation of the same phenomenon. Coercive control is defined as a pattern of behaviors in which one member of a relationship attempts to control or manipulate the other, and Oliver’s relationship with Evie is an exploration of how that control succeeds.
Initially, it appears to Evie that Oliver’s contacting her while she is with other people is simply a demonstration of his infatuation, which is flattering. His wish to know her schedule is, she insists to Drew, a demonstration of support for her academic studies. When Oliver criticizes her or demonstrates jealousy when she spends time with other friends, like Bree, Evie makes excuses for him, trying to convince herself and others that Oliver really is the perfect boyfriend. Evie is willing to change herself to please him, submitting to his sexual demands and changing her Regency dress for his sake, demonstrating the success of his manipulative tactics. It takes time and a great deal of misery—and the heavy weight of the engagement ring she doesn’t want on her finger, along with seeing Drew again—to make Evie aware of how much of herself she’s cut off or changed in trying to please Oliver. When her own freedom and happiness become more important to her than pleasing him, Oliver attempts to kill both himself and her, unable to tolerate her autonomy.
Evie herself asks why she, as an intelligent young woman, didn’t simply leave him. This raises the complicated question of why partners might stay in an abusive relationship. In the early days, Evie’s infatuation with Oliver carried the day, in concert with her insecurities. She felt she was inside a grand romance, and if Oliver was the perfect boyfriend, then any friction must have been her fault, proof that she needed to try harder to please him. Later, Evie admits that her pride prevented her from admitting to her friends that she might have been mistaken. She admits that part of her was gratified by Oliver’s apparent complete devotion to her. These reactions hint at the complicated and nuanced reasons one might choose to remain a relationship characterized by coercive control.
Grey shows how coercive control can be part of a spectrum that leads to more direct emotional abuse and violence. Oliver escalates his tactics when he uses the threat of suicide to coerce Evie into choosing him over Drew. Anderson does the same when he presumably tampers with Annie’s medications to kill her. These actions set coercive control more solidly within the realm of domestic abuse and violence, and the dramatic means of Evie’s escape—a car crash, followed by amnesia—illustrate how difficult it can be for the abused partner to escape.
Language and Story as Building Blocks of Identity
Evie’s youthful interest in forensic linguistics illuminates the novel’s larger interest in language, stories, and means of communication. The events of the novel directly explore the means people use to communicate and express themselves, as well as the impacts that words can have.
Evie’s fascination with idiolect suggests that how people express themselves defines their personalities and identities. Anderson’s disordered adjectives, violating an unwritten rule of the English language, represent his disordered mind. That both Anderson and Oliver impersonate others, misrepresenting their motives, is an extension of their narcissism and coercive control. They use impersonation as a means to an end, to put their own spin on a narrative, as when Oliver sends the email to Evie’s parents. When Evie identifies that the use of the period after her name is unlike her, she’s asking her parents to recognize who she really is at her core—her personality, her preferences, and her love for them, all of which she feels are expressed in her unique style of written communication.
At one point, amnesiac Evie wonders, “Aren’t we meant to be the sum of our experiences?” (304). This questions how much our view of our lives is a story we tell ourselves. Memories themselves can be a narrative, as Evie learns. When half her story goes missing, she feels the need to fill in those 13 years as if her life unfolds in a logical sequence that will explain how she arrived where she did. Evie is fundamentally interested in language and story; in addition to making patterns of language her academic focus, she aspires to be a fiction writer, using narrative to explore her own identity and those of others. This love of narrative partially accounts for her affair with Oliver, whom she initially perceives as a real-life version of the romantic heroes in her favorite books. She makes excuses for and defends Oliver to her friends and family because she wants to protect the story of an ideal romance.
Drew’s photographs are another method of communication, and when he shares his exhibit of Evie, she sees a far different and sadder narrative of her life. His images are his language. Drew’s narrative of his own life, reflected in his artist’s statement and the cautions he initially gives himself about getting involved again with Evie, is a story of heartbreak and abandonment that parallels Evie’s. When Evie gets her memories back, she gains a narrative that explains the sequence of events leading her to where she ended up, but more importantly, she understands the narrative logic that motivated her choices and those of others. Oliver clung to her in part to keep her from Drew, and she stayed with Oliver first to protect him and then to protect Drew. In admitting to Drew that the object of her affection should have been him all along, Evie is rewriting the painful trajectory of the past 13 years and giving herself the happy ending she seeks, showing how powerful the stories we tell ourselves can be.
Reconciliation as a Source of Healing
In addressing many varieties of loss and their consequences, the novel investigates the complexity of grief and the difficulty of reconciliation. While the reconciliation between Evie and Drew at the end of the novel offers them a chance at the happiness that Oliver denied them, the conclusions of other relationships suggest that there is no easy remedy for deep loss.
While Evie, the protagonist, appears to have lost the most, Drew is the character who grapples most significantly with grief and its consequences. Evie has hurt Drew multiple times, including when he caused a rift by not revealing his reasons for missing their formal. What appears to him as her hot and cold behavior since then, including the text instructing him to pretend they never met, have made him feel abandoned. Present-day Drew feels haunted by “[t]he endless, haunting, unchangeable dance of all that was said and unsaid as life pushes you further from the opportunity you lost to make things right” (38). Furthermore, the loss of their friendship impacted Drew’s later life choices. He reflects:
The fracture of our friendship was the catalyst for a decade of chasing the wrong relationships, gravitating toward situations I knew would fail before they even began. Always holding out some crazed hope that something massive would shift and a miracle would happen and we’d get our plan B start (161).
He’s sure this idea of reconciliation is a fantasy, which puts him on his guard with Evie and creates continuing apprehension and discomfort.
Drew introduces the notions of complicated grief when he considers his relationship with Oliver: “Someone you’re problematically tangled up with dies, and it’s all about guilt, regret, and resentment” (232). Oliver, as his older half-brother, could have been a positive role model for Drew, but instead he antagonized and sabotaged him, spurred to jealous rivalry by their father, Anderson. Drew’s grief for his mother is complicated as well, as he is certain Anderson is responsible for her decline if not directly accountable for her death. These several abandonments have made Drew understandably wary and explain why he doesn’t simply tell Evie everything from the beginning.
Evie initially has her own complicated grief. She doesn’t mourn the loss of a husband she can’t remember, but from the opening prologue, she misses her parents and Bree. Reconciling with them over the course of the book forms a healing trajectory that leads her, finally, to reconcile with Drew. Evie must not only grieve losing them, but also acknowledge her own role in creating the distance. Honesty and knowledge, the novel suggests, can go a great way toward assuaging grief. When Drew has proof that his mother didn’t intend suicide, he feels differently about that loss. Evie admits and apologizes for her role in pushing Bree and her parents aside, which helps to reunite those relationships. Ultimately, Grey suggests, true reconciliation can heal grief. When Evie and Drew reconcile at the end, in full knowledge of all that has happened between and to them, they are able to set aside the past heartbreaks and commit to a hopeful future together.
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