50 pages • 1 hour read
Alice FeeneyGood Bad Girl: A Novel
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.
Chapters 26-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary: “Clio”
Clio visits the man she’s been calling—her brother, Jude—in Covent Garden. Clio tells Jude about the murder in the home, and they argue about the past: how Jude tricked their mother into signing the papers to commit her to the home and how Jude only cares about getting his share of the inheritance. Clio tells him about how Edith has changed her will to benefit someone named Patience Liddell. Though Clio doesn’t know who Patience is, Jude is overjoyed to learn this since Patience lives right above his art gallery.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Patience”
As Edith takes Dickens for a walk, Jude and Clio go upstairs to confront Patience. Clio doesn’t recognize Patience, but Patience recognizes Clio from the home. Jude and Clio find evidence of Patience’s connection to Edith throughout the room—Edith’s bank card in Patience’s purse, Edith’s ladybug ring on Patience’s finger, and money on Patience’s bed that they assume is from Edith but is money Patience earned herself or stole from Joy. Patience tries to run but is caught on the stairs by Charlotte.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Edith”
Edith takes Dickens to St. Paul’s, where she considers giving Patience another chance and trusting her again. She has a plastic bag on her that contains a bronze statue of a magnifying glass—a gift given to her when she retired from working as a detective in a supermarket. Edith knows that this statue was used to kill Joy, and she wants to dispose of it.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Frankie”
After leaving the gallery, Frankie sits in a café outside St. Paul’s. She knows that Jude was lying to her about not knowing her daughter, but she doesn’t know what to do about that. While sitting in the café, she doesn’t see the police enter the gallery or drag a young girl out of it. She receives a brief text message: “HELP ME MUM” (139).
Chapter 30 Summary: “Clio”
Jude tells Clio about his connection to Patience. When Clio sees the paper cuttings in the room, she realizes that Jude sent her one for Christmas a few years ago—the same one Frankie stole from her office. Jude speculates that the police are arresting Patience downstairs because she was stealing from their mother and because she killed Joy. Clio isn’t convinced; the police told her that Edith had three visitors the day before, one of whom was impersonating Clio. Patience being the murderer doesn’t explain this. Jude brushes her off and says that when all of this is over, the two of them should permanently part ways.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Patience”
Patience, at the police station but still in possession of a phone, texts someone about her predicament. The person texts back that they will help if Patience keeps quiet. Charlotte comes in and questions Patience. Patience admits to having stolen from the home and having been found out by Joy, but she denies being involved in the murder. Patience asks for the one phone call she’s legally allowed.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Frankie”
Frankie, deeply emotional from this contact with her estranged daughter, tries to figure out how to locate her. Frankie suspects that Jude knows more than he lets on, so she figures out how to break into the gallery through a side door. This doorway leads her up a stairwell that takes her to Patience’s room. Frankie is relieved to find all of the evidence of Patience having lived in this room. She knows that Jude and Clio must know where Patience is, so she resolves to pay Clio a visit to her home.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Clio”
Clio returns home and reflects on what her life used to be: She used to have a daughter and a husband, but now both are gone. She thinks that she knows where her mother, left to her own devices, would go. She’s not ready to go to that place yet, though, so she goes to a nearby graveyard and cries in front of a tiny headstone.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Frankie”
Frankie spies Clio crying over a child’s grave. After Clio leaves, Frankie sees that the grave is that of a child who died at less than a year old. Now feeling bad for Clio, Frankie decides that using her connections at the prison to trace her daughter’s phone might be the better course of action. She goes to the prison and tricks security into allowing her in with her phone. While in the library, she meets Liberty, a young woman who was imprisoned for hacking. Liberty catches Frankie with her smuggled-in phone, and Frankie asks Liberty if she can help her trace someone else’s phone.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Patience”
Patience’s phone call went to voicemail, so she finds herself being taken to a women’s prison. She’s stripped of her possessions, including her phone, and assigned to a cell. Her cellmate is a young woman named Liberty.
Chapter 36 Summary: “Edith”
Edith leaves St. Paul’s and returns to Patience’s attic, which appears to have been ransacked. She decides she’s going to return home.
Chapter 37 Summary: “Clio”
Clio returns home and reflects on how her life fell apart: She gave birth to Eleanor Kennedy, her daughter, after several years of trying for a baby. Eleanor was beautiful and had a face covered in birthmarks like freckles. Clio had reconciled with her mother before Eleanor’s birth, so Edith was part of the child’s life. After a single trip to the supermarket, though, Eleanor went missing, Clio’s husband left her, and everything changed.
Chapter 38 Summary: “Patience”
Patience tells Liberty about how she ended up in prison. Patience says that she was framed for a murder she didn’t commit; she thinks that someone she trusted too much in the home set her up.
Chapters 26-38 Analysis
This section continues to develop the connections between The Plurality of Identity and Navigating Ambiguous Moralities by exploring the subjective nature of memory. When Clio argues with Jude about what’s best for their mother, Jude snipes, “You’re just like Mum, do you know that? It’s as though you’ve turned into her. Changing the narrative to whatever story suits your own conscience best. Turning a blind eye to anything that makes you look like a lousy daughter” (124). While Edith earlier suggests that the mutability of memory can have positive outcomes, Jude’s interpretation is more cynical. He suggests that Clio’s capacity for reinterpreting and reimagining her own past is limited by her own ego; Jude thinks that Clio reinterprets the past to downplay her own wrongdoing and wallow in her victimhood, which has become central to her self-conception. Jude’s assertion that Clio has “turned into” Edith is a way of hurting her; he knows how Clio reviles many of their mother’s past actions. The statement also introduces a thematic element that will run through the rest of the narrative—the idea that daughters inherit their mothers’ traumas and are shaped by those traumas into repeating their mothers’ mistakes.
While Jude espouses one of the novel’s more cynical attitudes toward the mother-child relationship, Frankie offers a more hopeful one. Frankie, in tracking Patience, reflects that “[t]he love between a mother and daughter is like a contract signed with invisible ink, but the terms and conditions do vary. Everybody has a mother, but not everybody has a mother’s love” (155). Frankie, like Jude, acknowledges that there is an inextricable and sometimes difficult bond between mothers and daughters; the language of love being like a “contract” speaks to the binding nature of this connection. This legal simile, though, speaks to Frankie’s more optimistic outlook on the mother-daughter relationship. A contract is a mutually agreed-upon arrangement that affects both parties involved. The comparison demonstrates that Frankie sees the mother-daughter connection as being more equitable than Jude does—an outlook that her own daughter eventually adopts.
Clio expresses a more ambiguous attitude toward the mother-daughter connection. In explaining why she chose to give her daughter (specifically, Patience) her maiden name, Clio reflects, “[G]iving up her name or any part of herself [when she married] wasn’t something she could comprehend or contemplate—and the baby was […] a part of herself she had gained and lost at the same time” (175). Clio doesn’t explicitly note what it is she “loses” when she gives birth to Patience/Eleanor, but this anecdote hints at why she might feel that having a child comes with sacrifice. Her desire to keep her maiden name in marriage speaks to a desire for autonomy; she wants no part of herself subsumed by her husband. Giving this maiden name to Patience/Eleanor speaks to an ambivalent desire: that the child should also remain free from her husband’s identity while simultaneously being claimed as part of Clio’s own identity. Clio’s need to “claim” her daughter in this way highlights the loss of control that she feels after giving birth—the way she feels her autonomy slipping away as motherhood becomes a new, defining aspect of her identity. This passage foreshadows and gives shape to the nature of Clio’s postpartum depression, which later sections discuss in more detail, and speaks to the novel’s theme of Reimagining the Expectations of Motherhood. Feeney suggests that it makes little sense to impose strict norms or definitions on motherhood when motherhood itself so radically transforms personal identity.
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