Shred Sisters

As the Shred sisters move through different phases of their lives, they become more estranged from each other and from the family itself. When Amy visits Ollie in Los Angeles, she asks her about the status of their relationship: “‘We’re attached,’ I said, lowering myself into the pool and holding on to the wall next to her. ‘Aren’t we?’” (138). Not only does this display a longing, on Amy’s part, to foster a genuine relationship with her sister, but it also conveys her deep-seated anxieties that such an attachment is impossible. This ambiguous estrangement spills over into Amy’s relationships with other people, particularly Marc Goodyear, evidencing the theme of Familial Trauma and the Power of Forgiveness. Marc, too, comes from a broken family—his mother “had fallen in love with another librarian and followed her to San Francisco” (149)—which renders him simultaneously greedy for attention and wary of dependence. Neither Amy nor Marc has the psychological tools to form healthy attachments with mutual support.

Bearing the burden of Ollie’s absence throughout her adolescence and adulthood hinders not only Amy’s relationships but also her efforts to understand and define who she herself is, developing the theme of The Need for Authenticity in Understanding the Self. In therapy, she does not want to speak of her sister, which prevents her from reaching conclusions about how to live her own life. She thinks, when her therapist asks to speak of Ollie, “I wasn’t able to quell the occasional fear that if she did return, Ollie would drag me down into the muck and ruin everything” (155). This fear must be left unspoken because (to Amy’s mind) it implies selfishness instead of understanding; Amy worries about her own emotional safety rather than extending compassion for her sister’s illness. This feels unacceptable to Amy, who has been taught to sublimate her own needs in favor of her sister’s.

Amy’s understanding of herself thus remains entangled with Ollie, particularly when it comes to navigating her family’s wishes. As Amy lashes out at her mother before the wedding, “I know you wish this was Ollie’s wedding. But it’s mine. Are you ever going to stop punishing me for not being Ollie?” (169). The family dynamic has coalesced around the central figure of Ollie: Dad wants to save her, Mom wants to change her, and Amy remains a pawn in their tug-of-war. Wearing the necklace that her mother had originally planned to give to Ollie is a burden rather than a kindness: “I could feel the butterfly clasp of my grandmother’s necklace dig into my neck” (173). Her sense of the necklace’s literal and metaphorical weight is the result of not just the family’s yearning for a different Ollie, one who would have worn the necklace at her own wedding, but also the weight of expectations. Amy must shoulder all the family’s hopes (and evade their disappointments) because Ollie cannot. This propels Amy to excel in her career. When she begins her work as an editor, she revels in the recognition that she so clearly craves: “A plaque with my name was mounted outside my office door, giving me immeasurable pleasure every time I crossed the threshold” (139). 

However, Amy still retains her tendency toward self-effacement, which becomes part of the underlying problem within her marriage. While Amy is successful, even bold, at work, she is quiet and withholding at home. Before she and Marc are married, she describes their sexual encounters as moments where she can escape herself: “I didn’t have to worry. And best of all, I didn’t have to think” (145). Sex is a way to dissociate from her anxieties (which usually center on Ollie). Eventually, their sex life becomes a routine of resistance from Amy (who fears intimacy) and insistence from Marc (who needs intimacy), and Amy continues to rely on sex as a way of escaping herself: “Sometimes the sex was so pleasurable, I’d forget who I was for a while” (150). Instead of forming an integrated identity, Amy continues to deflect or deny what she wants and who she is apart from Ollie.

At the same time, Amy resists acknowledging the extent to which Ollie shapes her self-perception. Certainly, when her therapist points out that “Josh, in a way, is Ollie” (175), Amy is not prepared to accept this: “I refused to believe that she permeated all my relationships” (179). However, the novel itself makes clear that Josh’s inability to focus and his impulsive behavior are very much reminiscent of Ollie’s. That Josh’s intrusion at the wedding—kissing Amy in full view of the entire wedding party—becomes a focal point in the dissolution of Amy’s marriage speaks to Ollie’s less tangible role in Amy’s relationship problems. In her reluctance to recognize this, Amy takes on an outsized responsibility for the burden of her failed marriage: “[I]t turned out that [Marc’s] only regret was marrying me” (181). Until she can accept that she has no responsibility for Ollie and that her self-loathing only hinders her growth, Amy will remain in stasis.