Content Warning: This section of the guide analyzes the source text’s graphic depiction of the sexual abuse of children, grief, addiction, and death by suicide.

“A magpie’s ancient arms coming through the mess of feathers; stubby and light and clean. That is the word we use about bones: clean.”

In this quote, Enright uses bones as symbolic of a release of the conflicts that burden human beings while alive. The skeleton is used as a symbol throughout the novel as a physical entity that metaphorically holds all of the traumas and joys of the past. In death, when bodies become bones, they are described as being clean because they are finally separated from the past. This quote also uses the magpie as a symbol. In Irish folklore, the magpie is a symbol of luck (good and bad). Seeing a magpie is an omen.

“It does not matter. I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns. All I have are ravings, more like.”

Because Veronica doesn’t know certain truths about her family’s past, she writes them in this novel as a way of coming to terms with the past. Veronica wants to understand the past, which she can’t because she has “ravings,” not “convictions.” Veronica writes a story where there is an absence of fact because she hopes to make sense of Liam’s death by suicide. This quote speaks to the power of storytelling and The Complexity of Memory.