58 pages • 1-hour read
The Poppy Fields
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and mental illness.
The Individual Nature of Grief and Healing
The Poppy Fields argues that grief and loss are inescapable as part of the human condition. The narrative also explores the ways that grief and loss often intersect with guilt, shame, blame, and other complex emotions. With the novel’s exploration of this issue, Erlick offers a compassionate perspective on individuals who struggle to process loss and look for ways to mitigate its impact, ultimately arguing that there are many ways to move beyond grief.
Early in the novel, Erlick describes grief as “the pain that comes for us all, the weight ultimately thrust on everyone” (2), establishing the inevitability of grief. Each of the characters has lost someone important, and those losses reshaped who they are as people. Ava lost both her grandmother and her relationship with her sister. Ray lost his brother, and Sasha lost her fiancé. In each case, the loss was a defining moment in their adult lives that initially destabilized them. As each character navigates their grief, they all learn different versions of the same lesson: Grief is a part of love, a sign of the significance of their connection with a lost loved one.
Each of these characters experienced a similar loss and comes to similar conclusions about the nature of love, loss, and grief, but Erlick is careful to depict each loss in a unique, multifaceted way. Through these distinct depictions, she argues that loss is individual and often complicated by other emotional factors. For Ava, anger and resentment compound the impact of her grandmother’s loss and her estrangement from Ellis. She is sure that if Ellis had been home for her grandmother’s decline and death, both she and Granny Mae would have had an easier time. She is also angry about her sister’s abandonment, which makes Mae’s loss harder to process. Ray feels anger toward his father and guilt because he treated Johnny in the same cold, distant way their father would have. Although he initially blames the treatment for his brother’s death, he ultimately realizes that he blames himself. Sasha, too, struggles at the intersection of grief and guilt. She blames herself for Dean’s death and feels shame because she does not think herself worthy of sympathy. Erlick depicts each distinct experience of grief to emphasize its uniquely individual nature.
After establishing the unique yet universal experience of loss, the novel delves into the solutions that the characters explore. The sleep treatment represents a way to sidestep some of the grieving process, and until the narrative’s end, Erlick seems poised to judge the sleep treatment and reject its utility. Sasha and the others learn that if grief is part of the human condition, it is ultimately inescapable, but the depiction of Ray and Johnny offers a more nuanced perspective. Johnny could not handle his grief, and Ray berated him, arguing that the sleep treatment represents weakness. Johnny argued the opposite, pointing out that there are many approaches available for dealing with grief, but tools like processing with friends, therapy, and medication do not work for everyone. He was adamant that seeking help is a sign of strength and that the sleep treatment is just one more psychological tool. With Ray’s change of heart at the end of the novel, Erlick underscores Johnny’s perspective: In the world of this novel, the sleep treatment is just one more psychological tool. Ray decides to take the treatment to soften his pain’s sharp edges and support Johnny’s position, which supports the novel’s underlying message: It is not a sign of weakness to ask for help or use the tools available to those looking to combat grief. Grief itself is different for everyone, Erlick asserts, and everyone deserves to use the approach that helps them the most, but regardless of approach, human support and connection remain crucial to healing.
The Impact of Family Relationships on Identity Development
Potential sleepers seek treatment at the Poppy Fields after a serious loss, often of a family member. Family dynamics loom large over this novel, intersecting with the novel’s investigation into the nature of grief. Fraught family dynamics have shaped each of the characters, and over the course of the narrative, they come to terms with how they want to define themselves and those family dynamics going forward.
Sisters Ava and Ellis are at the core of the novel’s depiction of troubled familial relationships and their impact on the individual. Their sibling relationship is important, but so are their relationships with their grandmother. Granny Mae encouraged Ellis’s intellectual development and nurtured Ava’s artistic ability; both girls embarked on their adult paths due in large part to Mae’s influence. She tailored her advice to each girl, demonstrating not only how much she loved them but also how well she knew them. Ellis was ambitious, but as a girl, Ava felt that family mattered more. She formed her identity mostly in relation to her sister’s: She characterized herself as reluctant because Ellis was assertive and shy because Ellis was not. Their eventual estrangement came as a blow to Ava, who cannot accept that her sister chose “the Poppy Fields over [their] family” (209). Yet Ava, shaped by both her sister’s and Mae’s love, has not given up on Ellis. Even when after the two have ceased all communication, she remains devoted to the idea of a relationship between them. This devotion causes her to travel to the Poppy Fields and is ultimately responsible for their reconciliation: Ava values love, relationships, and family because of her grandmother’s influence, and those values shape who she is as an adult.
Family relationships are also important to Ray. Like Ava and Ellis, Ray and his brother Johnny were shaped by a parent, but unlike Ava and Ellis, that relationship was not healthy. Ray’s father was disconnected from his emotions and did not teach his sons to understand their own emotions. He had impossibly high standards, and his sons grew up with the distinct impression that they were never “enough” for their father, nor were they as “manly” as he would have liked them to be. His “respect” always “seemed unattainable” (25). As an adult, Ray’s lack of emotional intelligence has impacted him at work when he refused to ask for help and in his personal life when he judged Johnny for seeking the sleep treatment. After Johnny’s death, Ray realizes that he has followed in their father’s footsteps despite his desire not to. However, he also discovers that his relationship with his brother has shaped him just as much as their father. He chooses a path of self-reflection to process loss because Johnny did the same. He remodels his emotional response system and ultimately chooses the sleep treatment as a way to honor his brother.
Sasha, too, is shaped by her family, although in a different way from the novel’s two pairs of siblings. She grew up in a traditional Korean American family that encouraged career success but also normative relationships like marriage and family. She was drawn to Dean because she loved him but also because she had been taught to visualize adulthood in terms of mother and wife roles. She wonders if the formulaic nature of her family’s representation of adulthood was responsible for her cold feet. In the wake of Dean’s death, she feels unworthy of her family’s sympathy because she is unsure whether love or family expectation was responsible for their relationship. Over the course of the novel, Sasha comes to terms with her relationship ambivalence, recognizing that family remains important to her, and one of her final acts in the novel is to call her parents on her birthday. Although Ava’s, Ray’s, and Sasha’s families are very different, each of the characters comes to terms with their family dynamics and, in the end, determines how they want to relate to their family in the future.
The Formation of Surrogate Families Through Shared Trauma
During their road trip, Sasha, Ava, Ray, and Sky form a surrogate family based on their shared experience of grief and loss. Although each member of this found family has experienced a different kind of loss, they bond over the ways that those losses have reshaped their identities. The way that they accept one another and the roles that they ultimately play in one another’s healing journeys become important aspects of each character’s journey, creating a found family that supports and nurtures them all.
Each character comes to the group with emotional baggage as a result of facing loss. Ava is isolated after her grandmother’s death and wants to reconnect with her sister. Having lifelong anxiety, she sometimes finds social situations difficult and has few meaningful bonds. Sasha blames herself for her ambivalence toward Dean and cannot reconcile herself to a world in which he was tragically killed right before they were to be married. Ray blames the Poppy Fields for his brother’s death and blames himself for not accepting his brother’s choice to seek treatment there. Meanwhile, Sky searches for her place in the world after witnessing a near overdose. At the beginning of the novel, each character is defined, in large part, by the emotional weight that they carry. They are also all cut off in some way from their biological family. While none of them begin the road trip with an understanding of how much they need a surrogate family, it becomes apparent as the group gets to know one another.
Every character struggles to gain acceptance from others and themselves. Ava feels out of place in most groups, and as a natural introvert, she has never felt as though she belonged. Sasha, a natural extrovert, struggles with self-acceptance because of her guilt: She feels unworthy of sympathy and of Dean’s love. Ray, too, struggles with self-acceptance: He regrets the way that he treated his brother and does not want to emulate his father’s toxic stoicism. Sky has never fit neatly into any identity box and is still figuring out her place in the world. Early in the novel, several of the characters worry that the others will not accept them once they know them better; Sasha, in particular, “wonder[s] what these two strangers would think if they heard her full story” (76-77).
Eventually, however, their full stories come out, and every member of the group finds acceptance rather than judgment. They have compassion for Sasha and note how common “cold feet” are prior to weddings. No one holds her responsible for Dean’s death, and everyone agrees that she is worthy of sympathy and compassion. Ray finds a similar acceptance for his own behavior with Johnny. They point out that he is emotionally available, citing his deep self-reflection after Johnny’s death as evidence. Although at first, the group struggles to accept that Ellis is Ava’s sister, they quickly admit that they understand why she chose to keep that relationship a secret.
Through their conversations, the characters heal, come to better understand themselves, and chart their course forward. Their road trip becomes one long therapy session between friends, and they have the opportunity to talk through their experiences. On his own, Ray might not have come to the conclusion that his behavior with Johnny was understandable, especially in light of their father’s problematic parenting. Sasha needed the support of the group, and particularly Sky, to realize that grief is part of living and loving and that the best way to honor Dean is to go through each stage of grief on her own. Ray also needs the group to figure out that the best way to honor his brother is to undergo the treatment, a posthumous nod to Johnny’s beliefs. Each member of the group receives wisdom and love from the others that is not available from their biological families, and each member of the group benefits from their relationships with one another. By the end of the novel, they have a bond that transcends their eventual separation, bound together into a chosen family by the powerful experience of support and acceptance.
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