The Flower Sisters

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death, death by suicide, and racism.

The Flowers Sisters unfolds across two timelines: 1928, when the dance hall explosion takes place, and 50 years later. The entire narrative is focused on showing that the grief and trauma of this event leads several key characters to lead lives of desperate isolation for a plethora of personal reasons. While Anderson examines the lingering impact of the tragedy on the town as a whole, this exploration focuses primarily on the Flowers women—Rose and Violet, the eponymous Flowers sisters, and Violet’s daughter and granddaughter. At the outset, Anderson establishes the existence of the Flowers family’s collective loneliness and sense of detachment from the community. Daisy comes to live with her grandmother, whom she initially knows as “Rose,” for a summer, but she has never met her grandmother before because her mother, Lettie, left home as a teenager and has not stayed in touch with the family. When Daisy arrives, Rose, too, is revealed to have led an equally solitary existence for years; her husband and in-laws are all dead, and she runs the funeral home alone. All three generations of Flowers women thus lead lonely, isolated lives, and they are all dealing with similar personal struggles, which indicates a shared, underlying cause.

Over the course of the book, Anderson untangles the stories of the three women, tracing their interconnected struggles back to the beginning. Rose, Lettie, and Daisy all experience different shades of loneliness and feelings of being misunderstood. For Daisy, this issue manifests as a lack of community and belonging because she has always been forced to move around as a child. This lack of constancy was caused by Lettie’s inherent wildness and desire for freedom, character traits that made her something of a pariah within her own family when she was young. This disconnect was, in turn, caused by the fear and shame that Rose felt over the incongruity of Lettie’s temperament and character with the rest of the Steinkamp family—especially because of her daughter’s true parentage, which “Rose” (who is really Violet) is forced to keep secret. In this manner, Anderson repeatedly demonstrates that the Flowers women are afflicted with a shared sense of loneliness and isolation that is perpetuated through the generations so intensely that it affects Daisy’s innocent attempts to connect with the community of Possum Flats.

By the end of the novel, Daisy’s struggles to bridge the gulf with her family and with the town finally bear fruit, and her work on the retrospective newspaper articles helps her to feel a strong sense of connectedness to Possum Flats. This shift is further reinforced when she learns the truth about her grandmother. Despite Violet’s initial fear of suffering further ostracism and rejection if the truth about her past were to be revealed, she soon finds that embracing the truth brings her closer to her granddaughter, who feels empathy for her grandmother’s story. Through this transformation, Anderson illustrates that honestly confronting the issues that cause separation and loneliness can result in a newfound sense of fellowship amongst previously estranged individuals.

However, matters are not as straightforward for Lettie and Violet. While Lettie’s sudden return home to reconnect with her mother on the day of the memorial picnic symbolizes the cathartic power of revisiting the past, she nonetheless leaves again by New Year’s Day. Thus, while Lettie does experience some measure of reconnection, her decision to leave indicates that not everything can be healed and repaired right away, especially when the years of lonely silence and misunderstanding outweigh the moment of reconnection. Thus, Lettie’s choice to leave adds nuance to the novel’s broader exploration of the complexities of generational trauma and the recurring patterns of loneliness that result; although some such wounds can be healed, others will continue to linger.