“On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that too.”

These opening sentences juxtapose a modern apartment dwelling with a medieval aspiration toward mysticism and bodily ecstasy. The repeated references to what the mystics promised or said reveal Blandine’s youth as she seeks to have a textbook experience of ecstasy in the manner of her idols.

“You could be persuaded you’d never seen her before, even if you passed her daily. You could be persuaded you saw her every day, even if you’d never passed her before.[…] She could be your neighbor. She could be your relative. She could be anyone.”

Gunty adopts the second-person singular tense to highlight the near-universal experience of passing a nondescript person who is nevertheless familiar. Blandine and Joan live in the same building, but Blandine has the sensation that Joan could be “anyone.” This describes the alienation and loneliness at the heart of modern living, as people living close by can be relative strangers.

“We are interconnected and interdependent, no matter how fiercely narcissism reigns.”

This quote from Elsie Blitz’s self-authored obituary underpins the novel’s thesis, as Gunty aims to show how one cannot live without impacting the lives of others. The quote is referred to by other characters throughout the book. Ironically, Elsie failed to recognize how her life was interdependent with her son Moses’s, as she was self-obsessed and neglectful.