The Conditions of Will

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes cursing, sexual content, depictions of rape and sexual violence, and discussions of anti-gay bias, emotional abuse, and death.

“I stare at the screen for a long time, blinking. It whistles around my clinically inclined brain that it’s not a positive sign that all I felt was a twinge of sadness. Not much more or less than a feeling of inconvenience. I know how you’re supposed to feel when a parent dies. People often experience a loss of identity, a crisis of self. […] Nothing. I don’t feel anything.”

Georgia Carter’s response to her father Will’s death captures the Complexities of Familial Relationships. Because Georgia is a self-aware character, she’s able to acknowledge the atypical nature of her emotions regarding Will’s passing. While she does experience “a twinge of sadness,” she doesn’t experience the expected “loss of identity” or “crisis of self.” The novel has yet to reveal the details of Georgia and Will’s relationship, but this passage points to the fraught nature of her paternal and familial history.

“Oliver struggled with the why. Struggles—present tense. Can’t blame him; it’s a really normal thing to struggle with. He looked for the answer at the bottom of bottles and in the beds of men old enough to be our father. That was probably our biggest divergence. He tried to smother the memories of our childhood. I tried to pull them apart.”

Georgia’s internal monologue as she prepares to contact Oliver about Will’s death reveals the complexity of her and Oliver’s familial relationships. She and Oliver have both been treated as outsiders by their parents and siblings, but their coping mechanisms over the years since haven’t always aligned. Whereas Oliver sought to escape his trauma via drinking and sex, Georgia has relied on psychological analysis to make sense of her trauma. The siblings’ divergent modes of operating will dictate much of Georgia and Oliver’s relationship in the present, and challenge them to confront their unhealthy dynamics anew.