47 pages • 1 hour read
Mary KubicaShe's Not Sorry
Fiction | Memoir in Verse | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Facebook is a motif that develops the theme of Secrets and Their Destructive Consequences as well as deception more broadly. Meghan Michaels first starts using Facebook after she and Nat Cohen connect at the divorce support group. Meghan is delighted to see Nat’s friend request on the social media platform “because it’s a time in [her] life when [she] could really use a friend” (48). Nat’s friend request makes her feel both validated and wanted. She sees the request as evidence that Nat “wants to reconnect” and “to be friends again” (48). Furthermore, spending time messaging with Nat on Facebook alleviates Meghan’s loneliness when her daughter is either staying with her father or hiding in her room. Facebook therefore offers Meghan the illusion of friendship and connection; the platform deceives Meghan into believing Nat’s story and the way that she presents herself. For example, she studies Nat’s idyllic photos with her alleged husband, Declan Roche, and finds evidence of Nat’s formerly happy life—exactly what Nat wants her to see so as to better manipulate her.
Nat’s/Caitlin’s fabricated Facebook profile is merely an extreme example of the way other characters curate their image on and offline. Facebook profiles capture and convey these characters’ self-deceptions and their desperation to manipulate the ways that others see them. Meghan knows “that social media is an optical illusion” and “an unreality,” as “it’s the very deliberate version of people’s lives that they want you to see” (67). However, Meghan easily falls for the way that Nat presents herself on the platform even though she herself has a fraught relationship with the platform. Meghan hasn’t “posted anything to Facebook since the divorce” because she’s ashamed of her lonely life and doesn’t want others to see who she really is without her happy family facade (67). The references to her out-of-date Facebook profile foreshadow the disappearance of Nat’s profile and pictures after she scams Meghan. Just as Meghan uses the site to deceive others into believing that she’s happy, Nat uses the site to deceive Meghan, play on her insecurities and fears, and ultimately to scam her out of $10,000.
Scrapbooks
Meghan’s old family scrapbooks symbolize the past. Sienna asks Meghan to dig up the old scrapbooks after she discovers the truth about her paternity. Meghan believes that she needs the books and images for a school project and therefore obliges her daughter. When she goes down into the basement to retrieve the books, she sits in a pile of mementos. Just flipping through the books reawakens Meghan’s memories and immerses her in the scenes, textures, atmospheres, and emotions of her past. Holding the books in her hand, she’s suddenly transported to “Sienna’s nursery with lullabies playing so softly from the CD player that they won’t wake Ben” (81). The books are therefore containers of Meghan and her family’s former life. Opening and going through them reignites Meghan’s connection with the past and in turn triggers traumatic memories and buried secrets.
Indeed, the scrapbooks are also gateways to the truth of Meghan’s shrouded past. Sienna wants to look through the books because she wants to understand who her real father is and why her mother lied to her. Going through the scrapbooks with her mother gives Sienna some insight into her early childhood and therefore into her mother’s character when she was still a baby. The questions she asks about these days while she and Meghan are looking at the books foreshadow Sienna and Meghan’s later confrontation about Sienna’s paternity.
Pedestrian Bridge
The pedestrian bridge over which Meghan pushes Caitlin is a symbolic crossroads. Meghan follows Caitlin to the bridge because she’s desperate to understand who Caitlin is and why she has targeted Meghan and her family. She threatens to call the police and report Caitlin for her crimes when they’re on the bridge, and Caitlin threatens to reveal Meghan’s secrets to her family to stop her from contacting the authorities. This leaves Meghan with a life-changing choice, and her decision to push Caitlin creates a clear delineation between her past and her present.
The characters’ scuffle on the bridge is also a metaphor for their power dynamic. Caitlin is “trying to gain leverage, distance, to shimmy away” from Meghan, while Meghan isn’t “letting her back down” (233). This tense action scene echoes how the characters have battled one another for control over their own lives and stories. When Meghan shoves Caitlin over the edge, she asserts her power over Caitlin and therefore alters the stakes of the narrative. This is part of why Meghan’s mind frequently returns to the bridge scene throughout the novel: She sees it as a turning point in her and Caitlin’s dynamic.
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