The Amateur

The narrator, an older Mira Winston looking back, explains that she did not attend Yale after killing Kenny Foster because she associated it with golf, which she could no longer play. She points out that in 1978, therapy was not a consideration for trauma. She tells the reader about two prior incidents that had contributed to her local reputation as reckless: smashing a car window belonging to Frank Pendleton, a boy who tried to rape her, and crashing her mother’s Camaro into a stop sign while stoned—police accepted her excuse that she had swerved to avoid a cat and did not realize she was high.

After Kenny’s death, Mira goes home and into her room, where her parents find her later. Her father, a contracts lawyer, is more focused on the club’s legal liability than on her emotional state. Mira feels guilty for Kenny’s death, remembering recent friendly conversations with him. Later, two detectives arrive to question her, but her father insists she remain silent until a lawyer is present. Detective Richie Marino, who had worked her earlier car-window case, references both that incident and the stop sign with a smirk. 

That evening, her brother, Spencer, calls from his internship in Washington, DC. Mira loves him but is also jealous of him—he never does anything wrong, and their parents clearly love him more than her. They discuss Kenny’s death, and he mentions a scene in the new movie Animal House where a character is comically hit by a golf ball, a detail that means that Mira will purposely avoid seeing that movie until much later in her life.

In the middle of the night following the accident, she walks through her quiet suburban neighborhood. She remembers a moment with Kenny in the school cafeteria, weeks before his death. As she walks, she passes the darkened houses of both Kenny and her 47-year-old lover, Theo Catton, her eyes welling up outside each one. She briefly considers dying by suicide. 

The next morning, Mira and her mother walk the dog. Her mother, who Mira knows is having an affair with their neighbor Sam Stetson, urges her to forget the incident and move on. Mira, however, insists she is done with golf and will not go to Yale.

That evening, the family’s priest, Father Whitlock, visits. He has just come from the Foster home and reports that Kenny’s parents are devastated. He gently warns Mira’s family that Kenny’s mother, Sharon Foster, is angry and, though she knows it is irrational, directs some of that anger at Mira.

The chapter opens with adult Mira reflecting on a tattoo she got when she was 19—reading “You took advantage of my disadvantage” (44), from Nabokov’s Lolita—inked just before she slept with a 49-year-old bartender. She now recognizes this event as a coded signal of ongoing damage rather than survival. 

She then returns to the summer when she was 15, establishing her exceptional golf ability and the social isolation it created: The high school had no girls’ team, her male peers avoided competing with her, and her father had withdrawn from playing with her once she surpassed his skill level.

She points out that these circumstances created the opportunity for Mira to meet Theo Catton, a 45-year-old married club member, through golf. When a spot opened in his foursome, he invited Mira, who was practicing nearby, to join. Throughout the round, he directed his attention at her with calculated warmth, and afterward, he asked for her phone number.

Mira discloses that she was 15 when they began having sex, and it continued until she was 18. She frames the situation with the acknowledgment that adolescent judgment is neurologically undeveloped, while also noting the year was 1975, and attitudes about girls and women were significantly different.

Two days after Kenny’s death, Mira visits the Foster home against her parents’ and her lawyer’s wishes to apologize to them. His mother Sharon tells Mira she is not angry at her personally but at the circumstances of her son’s death. She warns Mira that she will be haunted by the event forever, and the visit ends with the two consoling each other. 

Just then, Kenny’s father, Nick, returns home. When he meets Mira, he recognizes her immediately. He begins to reveal that he once saw her with Theo Catton at a hotel near Grand Central Station in Manhattan but stops himself mid-sentence upon realizing that they must’ve been checking in together. Mira tells the reader that this moment of near-exposure will make an already catastrophic summer significantly worse.

Mira insists that she is a reliable narrator, but she states that killing someone irrevocably breaks a person. After visiting the Fosters, she is shaken by Nick’s knowledge about her and Theo. She drives to her friend Marie Morris’s house and then on to a McDonald’s in Yonkers; along the way, they discuss the risk of exposure, with Mira expressing more concern for protecting Theo than for her own situation. 

In the wake of the accident, she decides to take a “gap year” instead of starting at Yale, considering other colleges to create distance from both golf and Theo. She visits her brother, Spencer, in Washington DC, where she rejects his attempts to absolve her of guilt. She reveals that her father has hired a lawyer, Mr. Cleon Barker, who told her that he cannot see how she could be held legally responsible. Despite this, she tells her brother that since Kenny’s death, she only feels “mostly” alive.

Mira reflects on how her 18-year-old self decided that her killing Kenny was punishment for having sex with Theo. After Nick recognizes her, Mira meets Theo for lunch to warn him. Theo calmly dismisses the threat and successfully persuades her to continue their relationship. They have sex one last time at the hotel after lunch. Mira reveals that the lunch and final encounter were the last time she saw Theo. She attends Kenny’s funeral the following day.

Contrary to what Theo thought would happen, Nick visits Mira’s parents and tells them he saw her checking into a Manhattan hotel with Theo Catton. He explains that he came because he had lost a child and did not want the Winstons to lose one too. When her parents confront her, Mira lies, insisting the sexual relationship with Theo began only after she turned 18, wanting to protect Theo from statutory rape charges. 

Her mother is conflicted, but her father, Peter, feels personally betrayed and enraged by Theo, a man he knows socially. Despite Mira’s pleas for them to let her end the affair quietly, her father refuses. He storms out of the house to confront Theo.

After her father leaves, Mira calls the Catton home to warn Theo. She reveals that her parents only know about a single hotel encounter, which happened when she was 18. Theo decides to meet her father outside in the hope that he can keep the truth from his family. Mira then confronts her mother about her own affair with Sam Stetson. Her mother admits to it, but she explains that Mira’s relationship with Theo has an unhealthy power imbalance, while her relationship with Sam is the private prerogative of a 47-year-old woman. She warns a reeling Mira not to lash out at her parents, who truly love her. 

Later, Frank Pendleton taunts Mira at a gas station, saying her taste runs to “middle-aged men and daddy dick” (97). Enraged, Mira swings her car door open and strikes his legs, causing him to limp away.