54 pages • 1 hour read
Talia HibbertA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chloe’s Get a Life list is an important motif throughout the work, and drives the plot forward. Through the creation and revision of her Get a Life list, Chloe finds true happiness and embraces a life that she did not think herself brave enough to pursue.
Chloe is organized and a list-maker by nature, but it is through adjusting or edits to the list that she finds the most happiness. As Chloe adjusts and edits to her list, she becomes more open and adaptable in her life as well. Chloe shows this in editing her list after the disappointment she feels at the bar with Red. She realizes that her drunken nights out with friends were only fun because of the company, and with this realization she decides to view it as an opportunity rather than a failure: “Maybe the list should be more than a box-ticking exercise. Maybe it should mean more. Maybe changing it wasn’t the end of the world” (273). She does just this, and in doing so, opens herself up to possibilities she thought were closed off to her, such as befriending Annie. She ultimately makes the biggest edit to her list: the addition of “Keep Red” (274), which illustrates that the list has shifted away from being a box-ticking exercise to an actual crystallization of what Chloe wants in life.
For much of the text, Chloe thinks that she needs the list to achieve self-love or bravery. Through her conversation with Gigi, she realizes that the creation of the list itself is an act of bravery and self-love: “She was the woman who’d decided to change her entire life with nothing but a list. She was the woman who survived, every single day. She was Chloe fucking Brown, and she was starting to wonder if she’d been brave from the beginning” (351). This revelation empowers Chloe to go back to Red and repair their relationship after their argument. In doing so, she achieves the final item on her list and the life that she wants.
Smudge is the cat that Chloe rescues from a tree in Chapter 3, which ultimately brings her and Red together. Smudge’s rescue acts as the inciting event in their relationship. Smudge symbolizes that taking unexpected risks can have far-reaching benefits in one’s life. Chloe saves Smudge on a whim: “Fetching this cat might not be the cleverest way to end her walk, but then, staid, sensible Chloe Brown was dead. New Chloe was a reckless, exciting sort of woman who, in moments of crisis, didn’t wait for the assistance of trained professionals” (40). Saving Smudge from the tree brings Chloe and Red together after she is unable to get down on her own. It also enables Chloe and Red to get to know each other as people rather than the projections they have created about one another in their heads, which sets their relationship in motion.
Smudge also brings unexpected friendship into Chloe’s life. After struggling with the loss of so many friendships because of their inability to understand her illness, Chloe does not have any friends outside of her family. Chloe feels true sadness when she discovers that Smudge has an owner, Annie, whom she meets up with to return Smudge. Annie is quirky and eager to befriend Chloe, which at first Chloe balks at. When Chloe changes her mind, however, she finds that Annie is just the kind of person Chloe needs in her life: “She was so…springy. Energetic. Possibly earnest, potentially a master of sarcasm. Chloe was not sure which, but she suspected her own prickliness stemmed from an urgent desire to find out, and a worry that she never would. How long had it been since she’d made and kept a friend?” (276). Annie and Chloe strike up and maintain a fast friendship, which extends through the Epilogue, a year later, when Chloe reveals that Annie even returned Smudge as a gift to Chloe and Red when they bought their first apartment. It brings clean narrative closure to the story that Chloe and Red once again end up with Smudge, the creature that brought them together in the first place.
Red’s art is a large part of his identity and symbolizes the growth he goes through in the text. At the beginning of the text, Red has left the London art scene to become the superintendent of his friend’s apartment complex. Red has yet to fully process his reasons for leaving, and this is a large part of his journey as well. Red questioned his identity as an artist due to his relationship with an abusive ex-girlfriend, Pippa who made Red believe “[he] was nothing without her” (303). After leaving Pippa, Red struggles to unlearn the idea that his success in the art world was due entirely to Pippa creating a “cultural moment” (303) around him.
After leaving London, Red’s art style radically changed: “[T]hese days, all he seemed to produce were vivid fever dreams that he occasionally liked, until he remembered what he’d been before” (123). At first, Red takes this to mean that his talent is ruined, but in a pivotal scene in Chapter 8, he embraces the change in his work which enables him to let go of his past and embrace his new self:
He hadn’t produced anything like his old stuff. He had forgotten to even try. In front of him was a vivid half dream, half nightmare of a landscape, the kind that made him feel frantic and reckless. So he had his answer. He’d lost himself. He took a moment to breathe through that realization, to sit with the finality of it. Oddly, it didn’t choke him. In fact, knowing it once and for all felt a little like lifting a weight (126).
This is a meaningful realization for Red because it acts as a catalyst for Red to be able to open up in other areas of his life, such as his burgeoning relationship with Chloe, as well as beginning to process the trauma of his past. When Red accepts that his artwork has irrevocably changed and views it as simply a new development in his life rather than an ending, it opens Red’s world up to other possibilities before him to improve his life.
Art
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British Literature
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Class
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Class
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Disability
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Fear
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Forgiveness
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Friendship
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Grief
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Hate & Anger
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Health & Medicine
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Laugh-out-Loud Books
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Loyalty & Betrayal
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Mortality & Death
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Romance
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Safety & Danger
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Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love
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