When the Wolf Comes Home

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, child abuse, suicidal ideation, disordered eating, and cursing.

Jess is the protagonist of the novel. She is an out-of-work actress who lives in Los Angeles. To earn money in between acting jobs, Jess works as a graveyard-shift waitress at a diner called Poppy’s.

The novel frames Jess’s character arc around the trauma of being abandoned by her father, Tommy, and the fear it has caused her to harbor throughout her life. The novel begins soon after Jess learned that Tommy died, which has left her unable to seek closure from his abandonment. The fact that Jess never managed to seek that closure when he was alive speaks to the impact that Tommy’s abandonment had on her in the first place. It is later revealed that Jess experienced an eating disorder when faced with the possibility of engaging with Tommy in the years after he left. She had forgotten the fact that Tommy was nearly responsible for her death on two occasions when she was a child. Even after she uncovers the truth about these events, Jess reiterates her wish for Tommy to have been present in her life when she was growing up.