Love and Other Words

Macy arrives at the weekend house to escape the stress of her regular life in the city. She lost or grew distant from her friends because she was preoccupied with the death of her mother while her peers focused on boys and dances. When she meets Elliot, she says she feels like they have an easy relationship. She says, “I hadn’t had easy in three years. I had friends who stopped knowing how to talk to me, or got tired of me being mopey, or were so focused on boys that we no longer had anything in common” (20). Then, when he asks about her mom, she says Elliot “ruined it.” At the start of the book, Macy doesn’t want to tell Elliot about her mother’s death. She fears he will look at her differently and only know her as a girl with a dead parent. She doesn’t want to open up about her dead mother because the grief is so strong.

Throughout, Macy deflects questions about her parents, first when asked about her mom in the “then” timeline and then when Elliot asks about her dad in “now.” In Healdsburg, Macy is not surrounded by people who know about her mother’s death, yet she is still not able to escape the reality of it.