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.

The Gathering is structured as a journey into memory. Enright emphasizes that memory is complex and often unreliable, but crucial to how individuals understand themselves and others.

Veronica, the narrator, is consumed by the past in the wake of her brother Liam’s death by suicide. She wants to tell Liam’s story and knows she can’t tell the full story unless she goes back in time. But her memory is necessarily faulty and mired by family trauma. Regarding the past, Veronica says, “History is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head” (13). Veronica’s memory is a jumble because dealing with her past is difficult and retraumatizing. Veronica wants to use memory to help her understand the present. What she discovers is that memory can be freeing, but it can also bring up unexpected and unanswerable questions.

In the course of her journey into the past, Veronica touches upon a difficult memory: witnessing her brother Liam’s molestation at the hands of a family friend named Lamb Nugent.