The Change

60 pages2-hour read

Fiction

Novel

Adult

Published in 2022

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Summaries & Analyses
Plot Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 1-10
Chapters 11-20
Chapters 21-30
Chapter 31-Epilogue
Character List
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Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Book Club Questions
Quizzes
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Reading Tools
Story Recap
Timeline
Discussion Questions
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Themes

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of graphic violence, sexual violence and harassment, rape, death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and cursing.

Menopause as a Source of Empowerment

In penning The Change, Miller defiantly refutes the misogynistic assumption that the natural process of menopause is a form of diminishment, and the women at the center of her story gain a sense of strength from the inner shifts they experience. In accordance with this trend, Miller actively celebrates female archetypes that have traditionally been vilified, most notably the topes of the witch and the crone. It is no accident that the women’s magical powers arise just as their decades of practical experience coalesce into the newfound confidence that comes with middle-age. As the three women grow confident enough to shed the illusions of their younger selves, they begin to consciously reject society’s expectations and access to powers that were previously unavailable. Miller skillfully blends these realizations with the women’s physical “changes” as they each go through the process of menopause. In this quasi-fantastical world, menopause is synonymous with wisdom and deeper knowledge, and Harriet, Nessa, and Jo gain power simply because they decide that no outside force—especially no masculine one—will ever again control their actions or suppress their voices. In this light, the novel argues that the social marginalization of older women is unjust and spectacularly misguided, for the three protagonists prove to be capable of extraordinary things.

Of the three women, Jo experiences the most stereotypical menopause symptoms, including intense hot flashes that simultaneously torment her and fuel her righteous fury. Long before the novel’s primary events, Jo spends years channeling the heat generated by her symptoms and directing this energy outward into the world. Years ago, she first used this unique inner heat to expose the wrongdoing of an upscale hotel that condoned and concealed the sexual misconduct of its high-end male guests. Later, Jo goes on to hone her athletic prowess, gaining yet another form of power and sharing her strength with other women by establishing Furious Fitness, a gym founded to give women a physical outlet for their rage against an unjust world. The feminist origins of Jo’s business are further illustrated when a man aggressively barges into her gym searching for one of her clients, and Jo uses the thermal energy radiating from her body as a physical weapon. In barring his progress, she is astonished when she leaves a hand-shaped burn on his face. When several of Jo’s run-ins with obstreperous male characters end in a similarly dramatic fashion, Jo realizes that she is finally learning to use her fiery anger as a motivational force to fuel decisive action that betters herself and other women. Significantly, the notorious hot flash, which has long been treated as a medical complaint, is the mechanism through which Jo’s unique power is expressed.

While Jo’s experiences are confrontational and overt, Harriett Osborne experiences a measured transformation in the aftermath of her failed marriage, which grants her space to undergo a strange, eldritch metamorphosis. Freed from the social scaffolding of her former life, she retreats to her garden and begins an intensive study of plant pharmacology, toxicology, and hoodoo. In the latter stages of this process, she takes it upon herself to punish violent men via devious, indirect means, and even her closest friends and allies acknowledge the deadly nature of her abilities:

Jo studied the witch looming over her. She’d never been frightened of Harriett, and she wasn’t now. But she was wary of Harriett’s power. […] There was something about her friend that wasn’t quite human anymore.

‘You knew Jackson Dunn was allergic to bees. And yet you spread seeds for a plant that would attract them.’

‘Yes.’ […]

‘Were you trying to—?’ […]

‘Kill him? […] Not necessarily. No more than he was trying to ruin my career’ (253).

This uneasy exchange makes Harriett’s role as a “punisher” explicit, and Harriett clearly considers her vindictive justice to be independent of the traditional mores and values that once restricted her life before menopausal. Now, Harriett’s endeavors are as wild and uncontrolled as her garden, and her power cannot be constrained by society’s long lists of “shouldn’ts” and “shoulds.”

However, Harriett’s deadlier proclivities are balanced by her ability to help other women and provide witch-like cures for their physical and emotional ailments. For example, she uses her extensive botanical knowledge to heal Amber Welsh in minutes, and her mysterious hangover cure appears several times. In essence, her arcane pharmacopeia is designed to resemble an archetypal witch’s tinctures and potions, and Harriett likewise remains on the story’s fringes, with the other two women serving as a bridge between her and society. Although she starts small, merely afflicting the pretentious Brendon Baker’s yard with lethal weeds, she later goes on to paralyze and murder an armed intruder, and she ultimately cultivates the invasive Scotch broom that plays a central role in burning Culling Pointe to the ground. Harriet’s abilities thus sharpen in direct proportion to her willingness to stop performing femininity for the benefit of others. As she declares to an invasive man quite early in the novel, she is “not bound by anything” (13), and this line foreshadows the full extent of her physical and philosophical transformation.

While Harriett and Jo’s respective talents are best employed to punish wrongdoers, they would both be rudderless without Nessa James’s ability to see and hear the ghosts of murdered women. Innately quiet and gentle, Nessa operates quite differently than her fury- and vengeance-driven counterparts, for she is following an age-old tradition passed down through the female line of her family. As her grandmother explains to a young Nessa in a flashback passage, the ability to hear the dead goes quiet during a woman’s reproductive years. In her grandmother’s wry words, “the gift arrives after the curse ends” (38), and this offhand comment depicts menopause itself as something far more nuanced than the inability to reproduce. Only when Nessa’s twin daughters leave for college and her parents die does she finally regain the inner silence that that restores her gift. Although her grief over her recent losses nearly destroys her, this experience grants her access to her deeper power.

Each woman of the trio undergoes a wildly different trajectory, but all three demonstrates Miller’s broader point: that society fears the innate power of older women who refuse to remain decorative, disdain external sources of approval, and use their hard-won wisdom in novel ways that make them impossible to control. Crucially, Miller does not romanticize suffering, but she does create a world in which women’s pain leads them to a greater purpose and empowers them to redress the culture-wide wrongs that caused their pain in the first place.

Channeling Anger to Enact Change

Just as the trio of women in The Change undergo dramatic internal shifts, they also enact significant change on the world around them, and this ongoing pattern highlights the multifaceted significance of the novel’s title. Throughout the story, Miller challenges the idea that suppressed rage is a character flaw to be managed. Instead, she portrays it as a logical reaction to systemic injustice. Once unleashed upon the world, this emotion thus becomes a deadly weapon, and each of the three protagonists carries a specific reservoir of anger that has been building for decades. Whether pressurized by workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, or systemic dismissal, the women’s anger is never portrayed as irrational, for it arises as an accurate response to real wrongdoing. However, rather than keeping their grievances unspoken, these women channel their righteous energy in concert with one another, thereby accomplishing a level of justice that official channels cannot attain.

Jo Levison’s anger is the most directly embodied. An entire chapter, titled “Josephine Levison’s Thirty-Year War,” traces the accumulation of grievances that constitute her adult life, for she spends decades fighting the changes in her body and pursuing a career in which she was consistently underestimated. Inwardly broken by her attempts to overhaul a hospitality industry that condoned the actions of sexual predators, she has accumulated a deep reservoir of fire and fury that desperately seeks expression in the world. The war concludes when she confronts the guest who assaulted a member of her cleaning staff. The surge of energy she feels in that moment is a detonation of every compromise she has ever made. Standing in Grand Central with blood running down her legs, she has an epiphany and recognizes that she had spent decades directing her fury at herself instead of indicting the misogynistic men and institutions that have been responsible for her situation. As she rechannels her energy, Furious Fitness is born, and she dedicates her time to providing women with a safe space and the acknowledgement that their anger is real and legitimate.

Harriett’s anger is more calculated and longer in gestation. For example, at her final day at the advertising agency, she watches a male creative director present a campaign that frames sexually experienced women as impure, and she suddenly recognizes the toxic and misogynistic patterns that she has endured for 25 years. Rather than absorbing the insult as she has before, she turns it back on the room, naming the ad’s harmful elements openly and forcing the men to hear their own misogynistic logic spoken plainly. When her CEO, Max, calls her a slur and orders security to see her out, Harriett walks home barefoot in the rain, feeling free for the first time. The violence she directs later in the novel is a continuation of this moment, for she categorically refuses to protect abusive men from the consequences of their behavior.

Nessa’s anger is quieter and longer suppressed, its expression delayed by grief and by a disposition toward care. But when the police chief dismisses Mandy Welsh’s disappearance as being consistent with the family’s poverty-stricken background, Nessa’s politeness gives way. Her eulogy at Mandy’s funeral is the clearest expression of this shift, for she delivers a public naming of exactly how the societal stigmas of poverty and race have deemed the girl’s life not worth saving. Her speech is not therapeutic or cathartic in the way that such gestures are often portrayed; instead, her words are intended to be prosecutorial, for she stands before an assembled community that needs to hear what has been done in its name.

Despite the three women’s determination to personally punish the men at the heart of these murders, Miller does not present vigilante violence as a morally uncomplicated undertaking. Instead, the novel tracks the costs of taking justice into one’s own hands. Harriett’s actions are irreversible, and as a side effect of the women’s efforts, Franklin loses his job, his career becoming unintentional collateral damage in their private war against the ultra-rich men of Culling Pointe. Similarly, Lucy is endangered precisely because the women’s investigation draws the wrong attention. Yet even so, the novel makes it clear that the legal system has already failed every girl at Danskammer Beach, long before the women take matters into their own hands. The women’s anger, Miller insists, was always justified, and the only remaining question is what they must do with it.

Systemic Exploitation of Women

As the events of the novel soon prove, the murders at the center of The Change are not random acts of individual depravity. Instead, Miller depicts them as the logical output of a social system in which extreme wealth can purchase immunity from consequences and gain an unrestrained right to prey upon the vulnerable. The girls who are murdered (one from Jamaica, another from a trailer park, and a third a foster child with no surviving family) are targeted precisely because the structures around them are least likely to register their absence.

Culling Pointe operates as Miller’s central symbol for this system. Its geography—a gated peninsula accessible only by a single road with a guarded entrance—creates the literal architecture of impunity. To make matters worse, the residents all lease their land from Leonard Shaw and are beholden to his rules; he holds the power to expel any neighbor he dislikes, but crucially, he never exercises this power against Spencer Harding despite his knowledge of the man’s murderous activities. And because the Pointe is essentially a closed system with no viable exit points, any woman who becomes ensnared by the community—from the hapless Mandy Welsh to the well-to-do Rosamund Harding—is doomed to suffer the abuse of the entitled men who reign here. Notably, the security staff and the maintenance workers travel through underground passages so residents are never reminded they exist, and all of these structures maintain the illusion that whatever happens on the Pointe is sealed off from the world outside. When divers finally retrieve the murdered girls from lobster traps on the ocean floor, the imagery of imprisonment is meant to emphasize that just like the lobster traps, Culling Pointe itself is a mechanism that goes on killing long after key perpetrators like Spencer Harding have ceased to exist.

Nessa’s slow recognition that there are more than three victims reveals the system’s scale, for she and the other women have stumbled upon a sustained practice made possible by the intersection of money, institutional protection, and the calculated targeting of girls whose disappearance the world had already decided not to notice. The police department’s role is equally architectural. Chief Rocca actively classifies Mandy Welsh’s disappearance as a runaway case, relying on her father’s criminal record and her family’s poverty to dismiss the girl herself as unworthy of investigation. The Newsnight special later reveals how comprehensively the department’s narrative machine operates, for Rocca deliberately rewrites the entire investigation on national television, seizing credit for the women’s work and installing himself as the lone competent authority. The department had even placed a mole capable of alerting Harding before his arrest—an act that results in Josh Gibbon’s murder and the attempted kidnapping of Lucy. In the overexaggerated, hyperbolic world of the novel, law enforcement acts as an agent of corruption and betrays those it is meant to protect. While real-world law enforcement does contain widespread elements of this issue, Miller’s depiction is utterly uncompromising, alleging that such corruption is the norm, not the exception.