45 pages • 1 hour read
Fran LittlewoodAmazing Grace Adams
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Motherhood as an Identity
Content Warning: This section references the death of a child.
Littlewood centers Grace Adams’s relationship with her daughter Lotte in order to explore motherhood’s meaning. Initially, Grace talks about being a mother as both a choice and an inborn tendency. In Chapter 9, she assures the television producer of Countdown, “I don’t want children. Not my thing” (36). She assumes that someone must have an innate desire to become a mother in order to embrace motherhood; she also assumes that someone without that desire can simply avoid motherhood altogether. At 28, Grace defines herself according to her intellectual capacities and vocational aspirations: She is a polyglot and an academic. She doesn’t get involved with Ben Kerr after their night together because she doesn’t want to sacrifice who she imagines herself becoming. Therefore, when she unexpectedly gets pregnant, Grace must redefine who she has been and who she will be in the future.
That raising, nurturing, and protecting Lotte alters Grace’s character suggests that motherhood is something other than Grace’s 28-year-old self realized. Grace’s endeavors to make amends with Lotte throughout the narrative present convey Grace’s maternal love and devotion. Her determination to attend Lotte’s party and bring her the cake exemplify Grace’s mothering instincts; Grace might have become a mother by accident, but it has become so central to who she is that it propels her entire character arc.
Nevertheless, Grace continues to resist owning motherhood as an authentic facet of her identity. In Chapter 28, she talks to a little girl in Japanese and thinks, “This Japanese-speaking version of her […] had vanished. And if that person was her, then who was she now? Which was the real Grace?” (111). The unplanned nature of Grace’s pregnancy is only half of what prevents motherhood from feeling like a genuine description of who she is. Ever since Bea died, Grace has seen herself as a failure and “a terrible mother” (159). She blames herself for what happened to Bea, and Nate Karlsson’s abuse of Lotte only fuels Grace’s fear that she has let both of her daughters down. The irony of her interaction with the Japanese girl is that her desire to connect with the child, however imperfectly expressed, reveals the answer to her question: The “real Grace” is a mother.
This is the message of the elderly woman who helps Grace in Chapter 37: That however one becomes a mother and whatever happens to one afterward, the identity is lifelong. Grace herself realizes this in the novel’s final moments. Even amid her grief over losing Bea to death and Lotte to impending adulthood, she reclaims her identity in relation to her daughters and in doing so makes peace with who she is.
Interconnection Between the Past and Present
Amazing Grace Adams suggests that the past and present are inevitably intertwined. Its very structure reflects this: Grace’s story does not take place chronologically but rather toggles between depictions of the past and the present. Though separated by months or years, the events of these successive chapters are typically causally or thematically related to one another. Chapter 49, for example, depicts Grace hesitating to chase after Bea and Bea’s subsequent death when a bus strikes her; Chapter 50 shows Grace waiting too long to catch Lotte as her daughter leaves to go to Ben’s house. The juxtaposition of parallel scenes underscores Grace’s anxiety about motherhood—her fear of being overprotective on the one hand or negligent on the other—as well as the ways in which her sense that she failed Bea has complicated her relationship with Lotte. The message is that the past not only shapes the present but intrudes within it, repeating itself in ways both large and small.
On some level, Grace understands this. If anything, the iCloud images of Bea and Lotte that she keeps with her suggest an overattachment to the past—an inability to let go of her trauma. However, the pictures also demonstrate Grace’s efforts to contain and control the past. Much as the flashback chapters structurally sequester the past from the “Now” chapters, the photos compartmentalize the past on Grace’s phone; she can choose to look at them, creating the illusion that she can similarly choose how she engages with her past. Ultimately, Grace attempts to control her past both to hide from her sorrow and to punish herself; by never directly confronting her feelings of responsibility for Bea’s death, she never lets go of the guilt that torments her.
The irony is that Grace’s efforts to contain the past ultimately make it far more intrusive. Because so much of her life remains unexamined, she is at the mercy of triggers she doesn’t understand or anticipate. Consequently, the more difficult Grace’s day becomes in the present, the more susceptible Grace is to memories of the past. The images of the mother with her child in Chapter 7, the little boy on his scooter in Chapter 19, and the car racing toward Grace in Chapter 46 all hold symbolic weight for Grace, becoming manifestations of her past, trauma, and grief that she struggles to cope with. Ultimately, the novel suggests that healing requires not merely recognizing but also accepting the interconnectedness of past and present.
Aging as a Form of Loss
Grace’s struggles with her age are in many ways an extension of her broader fear of change and loss. For years, Grace has lived in conflict with her evolving identity and her unexpected circumstances. Grace never saw herself having children or settling down. Her talent, intellect, youth, and beauty allowed her to persuade herself that growing older was imaginary: something she could defy by choosing an alternate form of womanhood. Grace told herself that she would reenter the workforce after Lotte’s birth and pick up her television career “right where she left off” (154). When a friend in the industry tells her that she is too late, Grace must suddenly confront the reality of time’s passage.
However, if the Grace of the narrative present no longer denies that reality, she continues to resent it. As Grace ages, she ridicules her body and appearance and envies her daughter’s youth and vibrancy. Ultimately, she sees aging as a form of loss, and because she has lost so much already, she doesn’t want to lose the currency of youth. Grace doesn’t know who she is as a mother, a spouse, or an intellectual, and her rapidly changing physiology further divorces Grace from her sense of self. Physical descriptions of aging—particularly menopause—permeate the novel and reflect Grace’s fear that she is losing much more than her looks. Her sense that hot flashes have transformed her body into a “sweat gland” suggests both that her body is no longer her own and that she is slowly being drained of who she is. The psychological effects of hormonal changes exacerbate this; for someone who has always prided herself on her intellect, the feeling that her mental clarity has faded feels like a loss of fundamental identity.
To combat the losses associated with aging, Grace tries to retain her memory of the person she was years prior: how she looked, how she spoke, and how she behaved. She also indulges in fantasies about the younger Nate Karlsson, convincing herself that he is interested in her to bolster her self-esteem. By the end of the novel, however, Grace learns that she cannot stop time. She cannot bring her former, younger self back any more than she can bring Bea back, but she finds peace in who she is now.
