65 pages • 2-hour read
Runaway: Stories
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of death, sexual violence, emotional abuse, and mental illness.
Gendered Expectations and Domestic Entrapment
Runaway consistently examines how gendered expectations constrain women’s lives and how domesticity becomes both a comfort and a prison. The opening story, “Runaway,” presents Carla’s marriage as a life structured around traditional gender roles. Clark is irritable, domineering, and self-absorbed, while Carla is expected to manage the household and appease him. Sylvia, the widowed neighbor, offers Carla an alternative image of womanhood. Sylvia (freed from gendered expectation by her husband’s death) has money, education, and independence; she represents female agency outside the confines of male authority. Carla’s return to Clark demonstrates the difficulty of breaking free from domestic entrapment. The potential fate of Flora, the goat, symbolizes this entrapment. Carla suspects that Clark has killed Flora, yet she chooses not to confront the truth. Flora’s disappearance represents the threat of violence underpinning Clark’s control, a threat that keeps Carla trapped. Ironically, Carla frames this ignorance as a chance to “be free.” Her silence reveals how domestic entrapment perpetuates itself, sustained by fear and expectation.
In “Soon,” Juliet lives with Eric and has a daughter, yet they aren’t married. This arrangement challenges the expectations of her parents’ small-town world, where cohabitation without marriage is considered shameful. When Juliet visits her parents, her father tries to hide her presence from the neighbors, ashamed not only of her choices but also of his own shame. Juliet contrasts her life with her parents’ lives; they remain bound by conventions they can’t escape. Her defiance of marriage isn’t simply rebellion but an assertion of autonomy in the face of social scrutiny. At the same time, she feels pity for her parents, especially her mother, whose years of dutiful domesticity have diminished her. Juliet senses that her parents live under an exhausting burden of expectation. Her disinterest in marrying Eric is both practical and symbolic: Marriage would only perpetuate the cycle of entrapment that captured her parents; instead, she clings to her autonomy. Juliet’s pity for her parents is bound up with her determination to resist their domestic fate, even as she struggles to define her own.
In “Powers,” Nancy grows up in a conservative society where marriage and household management define a woman’s purpose. When she agrees to marry Wilf, she willingly adopts these expectations, content to run the household while he works. Unlike Clara or Juliet, Nancy doesn’t feel trapped. Devoid of passion or romance, however, her marriage represents conformity rather than fulfillment. This contrasts with the unconventional, destructive relationship Nancy sets in motion when she introduces Tessa and Ollie. Ollie manipulates Tessa into a life of exploitation, making her perform her powers for profit, an arrangement that fuses domestic entrapment and outright coercion, and later places her in a mental health facility. Ollie’s control destroys both Tessa’s powers and her independence. Nancy has thus inadvertently facilitated the entrapment of another woman while she becomes bound in a more ordinary domestic life. Ironically, Nancy spends her life haunted by regret. She sees in Tessa’s fate a distorted reflection of herself, recognizing too late how gendered expectations and male authority have entrapped them both.
The Elusiveness of Closure and Moral Clarity
In “Silence,” the absence of closure shapes Juliet’s later life. Her daughter, Penelope, cuts off all contact and disappears into a spiritual retreat. Juliet learns this not from Penelope herself but from intermediaries, a form of silence that is more devastating than open conflict. The loss is compounded by the lack of explanation. Unlike an argument that leaves traces of reasoning, Penelope’s withdrawal creates a void. The story emphasizes Juliet’s sense of “fury,” but the silence means that she has nowhere to direct her anger. The silence denies her the possibility of clarity. This estrangement gains further resonance through its contrast with the preceding story, “Soon,” in which Juliet argues with a priest about faith. She defends atheism, positioning herself as a rational skeptic. In “Silence,” however, she confronts a situation that defies rational understanding, as her daughter seeks out spiritualism without consulting her. This time, Juliet has no one to argue with. Penelope’s decision imposes closure on her without reason. It leaves Juliet unsettled, unable to find peace or comprehend the moral logic of her daughter’s rejection. Silence emphasizes the elusiveness of closure.
In “Trespasses,” Lauren becomes entangled with Delphine, a lonely woman who once lost a child. At first, their friendship seems benign, even affectionate. However, Delphine soon becomes overbearing, and Lauren begins to fear her. She comes to believe that Delphine is her real mother, a suspicion that unsettles her family. The story grows increasingly ambiguous as it reveals Delphine’s motives. Delphine has spent her life seeking a substitute form of closure, projecting her longing onto Lauren. Her obsession blinds her to the damage she inflicts, since she unsettles the very child she hopes to connect with. Delphine is both pitiable and dangerous, illustrating how the desire for closure can lead to a breakdown in moral clarity. Delphine’s eventual realization that her daughter is gone forever provides her with a form of certainty, but this certainty devastates rather than consoles. Closure arrives, but moral clarity remains elusive because Delphine’s pursuit of healing has caused harm to another family. For Delphine, closure is neither cathartic nor clear. The closure that seemed so elusive and important fails to bring peace to her life.
In “Tricks,” Robin rues her missed encounter with Daniel. Their initial meeting awakens in her the possibility of romance and independence. For a year, she nurtures this dream, only to be devastated when Daniel seemingly rejects her at their reunion. This moment reshapes Robin’s life. She never falls in love again, and the narrative leaps forward to a future version of Robin who has grown older and more independent but carries the burden of that loss. To cope, she invents fictions about why Daniel rejected her, providing herself with a kind of functional but fictional closure that allows her to move forward. This closure isn’t grounded in moral clarity or reality. It’s a narrative she constructs, a way of soothing herself without ever knowing the truth. When she finally learns that Daniel had a twin, the irony is brutal. She receives both closure and clarity, but far too late. The knowledge confirms her original sense that Daniel was a good man, while also confronting her with the wasted decades of her life. Closure in this case is both complete and useless, because it can’t restore the time lost or the chances that have escaped Robin forever.
Fleeting Moments of Agency
The titular story, “Runaway,” establishes the collection’s focus on agency. Carla, once carried away by the excitement of eloping with Clark, years later lives in poverty and disillusionment. She tells herself that she chose this life, but recognizes that her choices have confined her. Their mobile home, the endless quarrels, and Clark’s irritability suggest her downward mobility. When Sylvia, her widowed neighbor, encourages her to leave, Carla feels a surge of independence. She imagines herself leaving Clark and beginning anew. In this moment of agency, she asserts control over her circumstances. However, the power of this choice is undermined almost immediately. Leaving Clark requires her to admit that her decision to marry him was a mistake. Returning to him allows her to preserve the illusion of consistency, even at the cost of her freedom. This conflict is summed up by Carla’s refusal to ask Clark about Flora the goat, who vanishes under suspicious circumstances. By choosing silence, Carla exerts agency through inaction. She decides not to confront what she suspects is the truth, as doing so would mean that she has as much agency or freedom as Flora. In this final choice, Carla demonstrates that her fleeting agency exists only in the form of denial.
In “Chance,” the young and intellectually ambitious Juliet meets Eric on a train, an encounter she interprets through her love of the Greek classics as a matter of fate. When he later writes to her, she chooses to visit him in his coastal town. Through this bold decision, she asserts her independence and willingness to pursue her desire on her own terms. However, the trip undermines her sense of agency. She arrives to find herself entangled in circumstances she can’t control: the funeral of Eric’s wife, the hostility of his neighbors, and the absence of Eric himself (who is with another lover). Juliet’s initial decision seems reckless, almost absurd, when she faces these realities. Her agency has led her into a situation where she feels powerless. However, when Eric returns and eventually becomes her partner, Juliet’s choice is partially vindicated, though her apparent agency over her life is revealed as fleeting. The story suggests that acts of agency may be momentary in their execution but enduring in their consequences.
In “Powers,” agency assumes a more tragic shape through the figure of Tessa. Tessa has the power to perceive hidden truths. This gift provides her with a modest but genuine independence. She lives simply, helping people find lost objects and building a life for herself. However, Nancy’s introducing her to Ollie alters everything. Promising money and romance, he persuades her to join him in a life that erodes her autonomy. Tessa surrenders her independence, believing that Ollie offers her an opportunity for expansion, only to find herself trapped in a situation that causes her powers to fade. The source of her agency disappears. When he can no longer profit from Tessa, he places her in a mental health facility, extinguishing her fleeting agency entirely. Later, Nancy dreams that Tessa briefly regains her powers, only to confront Ollie’s intention to betray her again. The dream sequence reveals how Nancy has come to view Tessa’s life as defined by temporary glimpses of control that collapse into subjugation. Nancy imagines Tessa choosing not to use her powers, refusing to see what’s in Ollie’s pockets, much like Carla refusing to search for Flora’s bones. This imagined refusal suggests that Tessa, whose ability to know once defined her, ultimately exercises agency only in surrender. Silence and submission replace her fleeting independence.
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