Blythe Connor is the novel’s narrator and protagonist who writes the letters that make up the bulk of the story. She is a writer who meets her husband Fox in college, and the two marry and have two children together. Blythe’s motivation for having a child is twofold: First, Fox desperately wants a child, and Blythe feels pressure to live up to his expectations of her as a wife and a mother—which are largely rooted in the amazing relationship he had with his parents, particularly his mother, Helen. Second, Blythe wants a child to disprove her belief that the women in her family are cursed to be poor caregivers.

Because Blythe is desperate to break her family’s cycle of inherited trauma, the challenges she encounters early on with her first child, Violet, are particularly hard for her to accept. In the face of incessant crying and difficulty in forming a mother-daughter bond, Blythe falls back on toxic thought processes and behaviors, such as letting Violet cry for hours. Blythe’s relationship with her mother, Cecilia, was adversarial, and she tends to view her relationship with Violet in a similar light even when Violet is only an infant.