The Amateur

Kenny Foster occupies a small but structurally decisive place in the novel: He is the friend whose death fractures Mira’s adolescence and gives her guilt its enduring shape. Kenny is presented as one of the few peers who treats Mira as a person rather than as a prodigy, a girl to be conquered, or a scandal to be gossiped about. His ordinariness—his humor, his loyalty, his willingness to include her—is precisely what makes his loss unbearable, because he represents the possibility of a relationship untainted by the coercive dynamics that dominate the rest of Mira’s world. When he dies, Mira loses both a friend and the version of herself that could exist in his company.

In the logic of “Mira Land,” Kenny’s death becomes evidence of cosmic bookkeeping: punishment for her relationship with Theo and confirmation that she is the cause of harm to the people around her. This misattribution is a symptom of her trauma, but it demonstrates how thoroughly her sense of agency has been warped into a sense of contamination. Kenny thus functions less as a fully rendered character than as an absence around which Mira organizes her guilt, and his memory recurs throughout the memoir as the emotional benchmark against which every subsequent loss is measured.

Theo Catton is the novel’s most sustained portrait of predatory manipulation, and much of Mira’s adult reckoning is a slow re-reading of what he actually was. On the surface, Theo presents himself as sophisticated, attentive, and singularly capable of recognizing Mira’s specialness—a flattery that lands with precision on a teenage girl who feels both exceptional and unseen. His grooming and abuse of her is framed, in the moment, as a private mutuality; in retrospect, it is unmistakably sexual abuse of a child, dressed in the vocabulary of romance.

Theo’s power lies in his ability to make Mira feel complicit, which is the deeper injury he inflicts. By allowing her to believe she is an equal partner in their secret rather than a survivor of his abuse, he ensures that the guilt of the relationship will be hers to carry long after he is gone. His presence in the memoir is therefore double: He is both the man who abused her and the internalized voice that convinces her she deserved it. Mira’s eventual naming of him for what he is—through the Lolita tattoo and through the memoir itself—is one of the book’s clearest acts of narrative reclamation.

Dennis Kerrington is a more ambiguous figure than Theo, and the novel is careful not to flatten him into a simple antagonist. He is one of the older men Mira gravitates toward in the wake of her trauma, and his relationship with her carries the same asymmetry of age, experience, and power that has already shaped her expectations of intimacy. What distinguishes Dennis is the sharpness of his dismissal: When he tells Mira to “be a banker” (153), he intends to belittle her ambitions and close off the possibility that she might make something of her creative life, a result of feeling threatened by the work she shows him and what it reveals about himself.

The line functions in the novel as an unintended catalyst. Where Theo’s cruelty operates by seduction, Dennis’s operates by contempt, and it is the contempt that finally galvanizes Mira into both leaving Dennis behind and committing to writing. Dennis is thus a figure through whom the memoir dramatizes how casually men in Mira’s life legislate what she is and is not permitted to become—and how, in this instance, the attempt to diminish her produces the opposite of its intent.

Ethan is a 29-year-old Vietnam veteran and freshman at Amherst College when Mira meets him through her roommate at Smith. He plays a foundational role in Mira’s changing understanding of her role in Kenny’s death and eventually, in her relationships with Theo and Dennis. He is kind, thoughtful, and nonjudgmental, and on their first date, offers insight to Mira that begins to shift her perspective on her own culpability for her trauma. He is also the first person to publicly stand up for Mira when he faces her dorm community’s condemnation, and he saves her life by showing concern for her when no one else does, returning to break down the door. 

The Mira who is writing the memoir 50 years later reveals that Ethan became her husband, continuing his role of being a steady source of love and support. His role in the novel is to illustrate how, despite the overwhelming condemnation that Mira faces, some people, particularly those outside her insular, affluent community, have a very different perspective on how she has been exploited and scapegoated.

Peter and Alexis are Mira’s parents, and they play a fundamental role in the way she understands and processes her trauma. Early on in the narrative, Mira highlights her parents’ alcohol addictions, telling the reader how she has been watering their scotch down since she was a child to regulate their numerous daily cocktails. She draws a subtle connection between her parents’ addictions and her own substance misuse through this characterization. Her father, Peter, is a contracts lawyer, a profession that colors his perspective on the accident and its aftermath. Instead of worrying about his daughter, he focuses on liability as a way to avoid engaging with the difficult emotions surrounding the case and his daughter’s obvious difficulties. 

Mira’s mother, Alexis, is more caring, although she tends to be proper and distant. Although Mira doesn’t confide the full extent of her distress to Alexis, at several points during the novel, Alexis reaffirms her love for her daughter and offers Mira nominal support. More significantly for the narrative, Alexis’s affair with neighbor Sam Stetson allows her to draw a distinction between her own adult affair and her daughter’s relationship with Theo Catton, which she describes as a “power imbalance.” The portrayals of Mira’s parents offer a portrait of distant parents who avoid dealing with the messy and painful complexities of their daughter’s life, helping to explain the evolution of Mira’s view of herself and understanding of her circumstances.