57 pages • 1-hour read
Play Nice
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, mental illness, and substance dependency.
Haunted Domestic Space as an Archive for Trauma
Both James and the demon capably identify Alexandra and Clio’s vulnerabilities and weaponize those qualities against them, all while eluding detection from others and isolating the women. Due to James’s placid and stable appearance, outsiders are as unlikely to suspect him of scheming—evidenced by the court’s decision to grant him full custody—as they are to believe that Alex’s house is inhabited by a demon. This causes Alexandra and Clio to begin to doubt themselves, deepening their suffering. Mother and daughter are traumatized by James’s gaslighting and manipulation, and it affects them as insidiously as the demon that possesses their home, causing their haunted domestic space to become an archive for trauma.
The demon identifies the cracks in the family’s dynamic and exploits those to manipulate Alexandra and Clio, just as James pinpoints Alex’s areas of weakness—her alcohol abuse, sensitivity, and insecurity—and uses them to undermine her. It doesn’t take long for Alex to realize that the demon “understood something, something that I did not. No one would believe me” (105). She can tell the truth, but because of the nature of the truth she tells, she will be doubted and mischaracterized. By the time Alex asks for investigators’ help to deal with the evil entity that is targeting her family, she is so exhausted that she struggles to effectively deal with any of her stressors. She writes, “I was already under the thumb of my ex-husband, whose constant criticisms of me and my parenting had put me in such a state of anxiety and paranoia,” adding, “it seemed particularly cruel for me to have ended up in yet another situation where I was […] Questioned about something I knew to be true” (201). Likewise, almost all of the friends she shared with James had already abandoned her, as he does such a masterful job of depicting her as “crazy.” Just as people don’t want to believe that demons are real and can haunt one’s home, neither do they want to believe James is capable of the manipulation Alex experiences.
Others’ failure to believe Alex, and later Clio, causes the women to question themselves, even self-medicating to deal with their pain. At one point, Alex says, “Maybe there was nothing wrong with the house, I just wanted to believe there was, instead of accepting that something might be wrong with me” (88). Similarly, when speaking to Daphne later on, Clio says, “I’m starting to suspect that part of me wants to believe the house is haunted, wants the place to prove to me that it is” (117). For mother and daughter, if the house really is haunted, then it means they’re not unwell. This is similar to when James lies about agreeing to take the girls on the weekend of the exorcism: Alex knows he didn’t “misunderstand” her and that he’s intentionally causing her to question her own memory. Alex and Clio both abuse substances to deal with the crushing anxiety and emotional overwhelm caused by their experiences in the home because of its constant association with trauma.
Alexandra’s own questions best illuminate this theme. She wonders if she will ever know what peace feels like, asking, “Was I cursed? What had I done to deserve my father? Or these cruel men I seemed to gravitate toward [….]. The restlessness of my mind. The ruthlessness of motherhood. What had I done to deserve these demons?” (258). In connecting the abusive men in her life to “demons,” like the one living in her home, she highlights the connection between her various traumas and her haunted domestic space. One’s home should be a place of peace and sanctuary, but past traumas can be triggered anytime—they are as unpredictable and alarming as a haunting.
The Problem of Contested Memory and Perceptions
The sisters’ different memories of life with their mother after their parents’ divorce cause a great deal of friction among them. Each believes her memory to be “the truth,” and so they must learn to accept that their sisters’ versions are just as truthful to them. It is only when they learn to stop making their memories into a competition about who experienced the most pain that they stop antagonizing one another and help each other heal. Thus, as the sisters seek to make sense of their past, they must deal with the problem of contested memory and perceptions.
Leda and Daphne are older, so they remember more about their time at 6 Edgewood than Clio, and both insist that their memories are more accurate and complete, putting Clio on the defensive and influencing her own memories. She says, “That’s their trump card. I was too young to remember what they remember, too young to comprehend the damage being inflicted” (19). Whenever Clio tries to defend Alex or express an opinion or memory other than those shared by her sisters, they shut her down, insisting on their heightened ability to recall what “really” happened.
This tendency is most apparent when Clio decides to go to Alex’s memorial. Daphne warns her, “They’re gonna talk about how much she loved us. How much she loved you. But she didn’t. What she did to us, it wasn’t out of love. We love you” (30). Daphne and Leda are so invested in getting Clio to believe their version of events, in part because they lied. When others at the service share memories of Alex, Clio doesn’t know what to say, as “To agree would be a betrayal of my sisters, of the truth” (37). The contested memories are so loaded with significance that Clio feels that remembering differently constitutes disloyalty.
Leda, Daphne, and Clio have to stop competing for “most traumatized” daughter and develop more empathy for one another—and for Alexandra—to heal from their experiences and rebuild their relationships. Clio initiates this movement when she reads Alex’s book and annotations. Although her mother describes events that are different from Clio’s memories, Clio thinks that “maybe what’s written is faithful to her recollection, to how it played out in her mind. One person’s truth is another’s fiction” (75). The family therapist echoes this idea when she cautions Leda against “comparing […] suffering. It’s impossible for us to know what others feel. Even those closest to us” (284). When the sisters stop comparing their pain, accepting that each suffered in unique and valid ways, only then can they stop fighting over whose memory is most accurate and start focusing on how to move forward lovingly together.
Clio puts it best when she says that, “Our demons are ours and ours alone” (321). No one can really know another person’s demons, their pain, and so comparing memories of suffering is both unreliable and counterintuitive. No one heals when people compete in this way.
Women’s Likability as a Prerequisite for Empathy and Safety
The experiences of the women in the text confirm the way society insists on women’s Likability. Women who are “difficult” or unlikable—in short, those who are less concerned with politeness to men or who are not conventionally attractive or maternal—receive signals that they are undeserving of others’ care and concern. Through the experiences of the female characters, the novel explores women’s Likability as a prerequisite for empathy and safety.
The juxtaposition of Alexandra and Amy, James’s wives, illuminates this pressure. Alex contradicted James, failing to maintain their house the way he thought she should and failing to be the mother he wanted her to be, so he characterized her as “crazy” while cheating on her. This was so effective that even she began to see herself this way. When Father John drives away, she writes, “I could see myself reflected in the glass, my hair a frizzy mess, my eyes bulging. I looked desperate. Exhausted. Deranged” (123). This is what the situation with James made her, rather than the other way around.
Amy, on the other hand, is bubbly and sweet—likeable in the ways Alex was not. Clio describes Amy’s “signature smell [as] comforting, too sweet and too much and yet somehow just right. It’s like inhaling caramel, snorting straight sugar. When she was our dance teacher, everyone wanted to smell like her, to look like her, be like her” (14-15). James prefers Amy because she never questions him or confronts him with his shortcomings. She is content for him to be the “captain” who makes the decisions and gives the orders. Even Clio, who can be somewhat unlikable herself, enjoys Amy’s bland congeniality. She says, “My relationship with Amy is about as deep as a baby pool. But it’s sweet and easy, and I think I prefer it that way” (108). Men and women both seem to prefer the company of women who are polite, deferential, and unquestioning of authority; they don’t rock the boat, and that seems to make everyone’s life easier.
Clio, Daphne, and Leda all fall short of the feminine ideal, rendering each somewhat “unlikable” in her own way, and their traumas often stem from these qualities and the way they are characterized by others. Alex used to condemn Leda for being “ugly” and she even chastised the girls for eating junk food, saying, “You’re going to be chubby. Do you know how hard it is to be a chubby girl in school? Do you want that for yourselves? [….] Go ask your dad how he feels about chubby girls” (48). Her instruction to ask James about his feelings on “chubby girls” suggests that she knows he will respond negatively. Alex knows that being likeable—which includes being pretty and thin—is the best protection from hurt feelings, and she is clearly torn between wanting to “protect” her daughters from society and encouraging them to be themselves. Being herself, after all, has led to a lot of pain.
Further, Daphne is very aware of James’s disappointment that she’s a lesbian, something that means she won’t “settle down” with a husband and live the “traditional” life he wants for her. Clio knows Austin will help her with home renovations because, she says, “I’m a girl-next-door fantasy” (125). As long as she plays the “likable” 20-something, she’s rewarded with positive attention from men, including James, but as soon as she begins acting like Alex, James begins to characterize her as “psychotic,” just as he did Alex. In these ways, all of the sisters are aware that being “likable” is often the only safe option for women in a patriarchal society.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence