Oona Out of Order

Another lesson that Oona must learn is that she won’t live well until she starts considering others and the consequences of her actions. In the first half of the novel, Oona is caught up in the difficulties of her time travel and behaves in a way that disregards the advice, feelings, and welfare of those around her—including her future and past selves. She both relies on and rejects her mother, and while her actions and feelings are understandable given her young age and extraordinary circumstances, they don’t help her and often end up hurting others.

This is most evident in how Oona hurts her mother with information about the future and in how she stalks and lies to her son, Kenzie. She naturally wants to change her situation and struggles against her fate, but as the novel progresses and she sees the results of her actions, it becomes clear that she does not operate in a world separate from the one everyone else inhabits, despite how it feels. A key turning point comes when Oona traumatizes her young son by lying about who she is. Afterward, she finally understands that the pain her actions caused will last for years—years where she has already witnessed him suffering. She tells her mother, “[T]he way I hurt Kenzie tonight, I—I never want to hurt anyone like that again. Especially not my son” (298).

Oona proves she has internalized this revelation when she asks Kenzie if she should try to do something to change his mothers’ deaths; she also tells him to go across the world to meet a potential boyfriend. These are selfless gestures—sharing Kenzie with others will cause Oona pain—that signal Oona’s maturity and allow her to stop wondering if she has been a good friend, daughter, and mother. She can instead simply be that person. This more selfless version of Oona can go back to the 1983 party with empathy for the bandmember with a drug problem, can help the band instead of following a solitary path, and can begin her financially successful life as a philanthropist.

This lesson can’t be well utilized, however, until Oona has also learned one of the others: how to be true to oneself. Without respecting who she is, Oona shows too much consideration for her husband Edward, and he takes advantage of her. Consideration for others, for Oona, must be balanced with self-awareness.

Being true to oneself is another lesson that Oona must learn in the process of her bildungsroman, intersecting particularly with becoming the artist she was meant to be. The guitar symbolizes Oona’s musical potential and passion, and by extension her fulfilled destiny. For a large portion of the novel, she denies this and merely collects guitars, thinking of the hobby as a tribute to Dale, who made it clear the guitar was his territory. The early, unformed Oona is willing to give up something she knows instinctively is hers in deference to the man she loves, and she is reluctant to acknowledge even privately that she might be as good as or better than Dale at playing.

It takes her mother’s truth-telling to jar her out of her nostalgic memory of Dale and convince her to study her passion. When she does, she finds her authenticity has consequences that extend far beyond music: It saves her from sinking during a failing marriage, opens her to a potential true love match in Peter Han, and enables her to stand up for herself to Dale when she goes back to the party. She finds fulfillment in guitar music in a way that also brings her self-esteem and joy, and this in turn brings her and the band success. Being true to herself enables Oona to, in the words of her son, live her best life.

In every part of Oona Out of Order, there is something that Oona gets addicted to or obsessed with, and part of her bildungsroman journey is finding the thing that gives her a high but isn’t destructive.

Oona’s first obsession is love. She describes her relationship with Dale in a way that hints at something less healthy than a youthfully naïve approach to romance: “They engulfed and consumed each other, but wasn’t that love?” (16). In retrospect, the novel suggests that this idea of love is immature and unhealthy. Her obsessive nostalgia for Dale holds Oona back for many chapters and years. It isn’t until she realizes that she should be able to maintain her own passions, beliefs, and personality in a relationship that Oona can be transported back to 1983, where she can experience the rest of the relationship in a healthier, more joyful way.

Oona’s second addiction is literal. In the 1990s club scene, drugs ranging from ecstasy to Special K (ketamine) allow Oona to forget her problems and excuse herself from the pain of her reality. When she thinks that “nothing [she] do[es] this year will matter because [she] know[s] how it all turns out” (19), she gives herself an excuse to be absent from herself and her mother. Complicating matters further, she begins to associate the high she feels from drugs with the high she feels from love. When she thinks about her boyfriend Crosby, she doesn’t think in terms of love but in terms of it being a “natural high.” It isn’t until she admits to Cyn that her father died because he was drunk that Oona realizes she needs to leave the party scene.

Oona’s third obsession involves the sex and physical pleasure she experiences with Edward, whom she falls into a relationship with despite knowing how it will end. Her fatalistic attitude allows her to lose herself just as she did with the drugs of her earlier incarnation: “Sex became a drug for Oona, a pheromone IV dripping a steady dose into her bloodstream, but wasn’t all love chemical?” (215). Her syntax parallels her earlier rationalization of her obsession with Dale, highlighting the continuity underlying the various ways Oona gets high.

Oona’s next addiction comes when she tries to have a relationship with her son in an unhealthy way. Her obsession with seeing him causes her to do things that are deeply dishonest and hurtful. Kenzie’s feelings are secondary to Oona’s desires, and her obsession goes far enough that she changes her entire look and life to insinuate herself into his life.

What pulls Oona out of the ever-changing rotation of obsessions is a commitment to and revelation about her love of the guitar. She and Peter refer to playing music as being “the best drug” and “a kind of high” that neither of them would be able to live without (195). This turns out to be a healthy obsession for Oona, as it fulfills her in a positive way and enables her to experience a high that builds her up and brings joy to others. When she figures out how to direct her obsessiveness toward something healthy and affirming, the other pieces of her life begin to fall into place.