“‘Regret’ can be my memoir’s theme, she thought, as she tried to shove the cheese grater into the dishwasher next to the frying pan. A Regretful Life, by Joy Delaney.”

Joy begins the novel full of unexpressed regrets, simmering resentments, and deeply held grudges that prevent her from embracing her imperfect family. She’s taking a night class at a local college on how to write a memoir. She’ll learn that these negative emotions don’t and can’t fit her life—much like the cheese grater, with its suggestion of hard edges and abrasive treatment, that she’s trying to shoehorn into the dishwasher next to the frying pan, which suggests community and family.

“‘I’m just being cautious,’ said Stan defensively. ‘We don’t know anything about her. She could rob us blind in the night and we’d feel like real dickheads calling the police in the morning.’”

One of the novel’s more intriguing mysteries early on is Joy’s unexamined willingness to accept a total stranger into their home and to make her feel like family. Here, on the first night of her stay at their home, Stan—who’s more pragmatic and more paranoid than Joy—busily secures their electronic valuables, certain that Savannah is there to rob them. Ironically, in the end, Savannah gives rather than robs—she gives the family a new beginning.

“You know that theory: if you put a frog in water and keep slowly turning up the heat, it doesn’t jump out because it doesn’t realize it’s slowly being boiled to death.”

This bizarre parable, which Stan shares, encapsulates his family’s dilemma. Without seeing it, without realizing it, they’ve become locked in a toxic family unit. Over time, despite making one apparently smart decision after another and never abandoning the idea that they love and support each other, they manage to create a dysfunctional family in which all the members simmer in their own grudges.