The Optimist's Daughter

Through the character of Laurel, the author contemplates the challenge of reconciling the past and the present in order to move forward. Laurel embodies the seeking character’s struggle to find her way among the ashes of her life. The deaths of her father, mother, and husband, and the present circumstances involving Fay’s new ownership of her childhood home, put Laurel in a nearly untenable conflict. She must navigate the grief of her father’s death, and the loss of her mother and her husband, under the hostile eyes of Fay, who cares nothing for the past and fails to gain any insight into Laurel’s struggle with loss and grief. As Laurel soon realizes, Fay and her family are incapable of understanding the deeper meaning of the events that unfold in their lives. Laurel, however, is stuck in the past, and she must understand it before she can imagine her future. Through Laurel’s character, the author shows that only when we make peace with our past, and understand that it is not memory but love that binds us and creates continuity in our lives, can we forgive and experience both suffering and joy at once.

Juxtaposed against Fay’s refusal to respect and honor the past, Laurel’s challenge is to recognize how easy it is to hold onto lies and stories of what really happened.