Content Warning: This section of the guide contains explicit descriptions of sexual violence, domestic abuse, suicide, and murder.

“Anna Williams-Bonner watched them, the writers, as they drifted across the library to the opened wine and the plastic cups and offered up laughably shallow praise to the man who’d just read to them. Then, before her eyes, the group defaulted to their eternal topics: the shortcomings of their former teachers, the inadequacies of the publishing world, and inevitably the writers they knew who happened not to be present tonight, in the library of this old New Hampshire mansion that art had built, long ago, in a less complicated time. And she thought: If these idiots can do it, how fucking hard can it be?”

In this scene, Anna initially describes “them, the writers” as though they are a group apart from herself. However, as Anna relates disgusted descriptions of their pretentious and short-sighted conversations, the author makes it clear that her protagonist is experiencing a significant turning point. Anna’s perspective also conveys her innate sense of superiority as she resolves to do what “these idiots” have accomplished and become a writer herself. Thus, while Anna herself finds the moment empowering, the scene is also designed to convey her calculating nature and willingness to indulge in a variety of fictions for her own benefit.

“Anna frowned, and not just because Matilda’s take bordered on tasteless. In fact, she had had no problem at all with being Jake’s widow. She’d gone to a good deal of trouble in order to be Jake’s widow. But when it came to what she was already thinking of as her own work, she was not sure she wished to be known professionally as Jake’s widow.”

This passage is emblematic of Anna’s broader quest to reinvent her identity and divorce herself from her late husband’s professional image. The author makes it a point to capture the annoyed turmoil of Anna’s private contemplations, using italics and sentence fragments to convey her sense of displeasure at Matilda’s assumptions. The strategic use of understatement in this scene also highlights Anna’s lack of remorse for her violent crimes, for she casually refers to the act of murdering her husband as going “to a good deal of trouble in order to be Jake’s widow.