The novel traces the evolution of Mia Hoffmann, Marco Bernardi, Richie Fournier, Adam Parker, Nina Guzman, and Sasha Karlsson-Lee’s friend group to explore how interpersonal dynamics within a chosen family can impact the individual members’ sense of self, revealing the tension between chosen family and individual identity. 

Over the course of their friendship, the characters’ family collective becomes a container for their identities and teaches them how to be in the world. On the one hand, the characters feel secure in their friend group, willing to explore, experiment, and evolve beyond the group while remaining connected to each other. On the other hand, the friend group dynamic often feels static and entrapping. When the characters feel at odds with each other—or that they have outgrown the group—they feel as if the group is threatening their ability to evolve as individuals.

The author enacts this tension between the group and each member’s individuality via the narrative structure. In each chapter, the third-person narrator is limited to either Mia’s, Marco’s, Richie’s, Adam’s, Nina’s, or Sasha’s point of view and provides insight into their private experiences of the world. Meanwhile, these chapters are contained within the larger narrative structure, which represents the friend group. Oftentimes, the friends’ internal monologues will contrast and create conflict with one another, because while all of the friends willingly spend time together, they do not always feel like themselves when they are trying to satisfy the agenda of the collective.

Sasha’s experience of identity provides insight into her friends’ experiences. While most people regard Sasha as self-possessed and intimidating, Sasha feels differently:

Between Mia and Adam and Wally and Theo, she was starting to feel as though who she was had already been determined. She was a roommate, a girlfriend, a used condom in a garbage dump in Indiana. There was no room for secrets, no room to discover the parts of herself that were still a mystery, that she hadn’t known were there. (38)

Like the others, Sasha values her connections with her friends and has come to understand herself according to them. However, she also feels as if the collective threatens her ability to explore and discover on her own terms. The other characters will similarly feel held back by the predominant decisions or beliefs of the collective. This is particularly true for Mia, who does not want to get married or have children. When Marco, Sasha, and Adam begin pursuing these conventional lifestyles, she feels left out and invalidated—unable to relate to her friends and self-conscious about the less-traditional path she has chosen.

The “push-and-pull” dynamic between the larger group ethos and the individual friend’s experiences conveys the similarities and differences between chosen and biological families. For these friends, the group dynamic sometimes feels limiting. The friends want the security of their tight-knit group but tend to resent each other when they feel they aren’t evolving at the same rate. At the same time, Ginder’s narrative implies that a found family is better able to withstand such conflicts because the individuals have chosen to share their lives with each other. The group is compelled to evolve along with its members’ unique evolutions.