64 pages • 2 hours read
Lisa JewellThe House We Grew Up In
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A 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 13-17 and EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Content Warning: This section includes the possibly triggering topic of sexual abuse and incest.
5 February 2011
Lorelei believes that Jim is the only man who fully understands her. He is empathetic because there is a connection between his drinking and her hoarding. As a child, he was neglected by his mother. Lorelei describes it as “an endless cycle. I’m sure your mother had her own stories, her own bad experiences and so it goes on” (377). Her own early life consisted of a series of tragedies: her stillborn sister, her father’s aggression, and learning that her mother was raped by a family friend, who also assaulted Lorelei. She punched him when he turned up at her mother’s funeral, and she notes that these tragedies left their marks: “The atmosphere, always there like a sinister fog” (377). She married Colin to have babies and undo the trauma of her past. Instead, new secrets and silences emerge. She hopes that the cycle will end with Megan, who is a better mother.
14 February 2011
Lorelei emails Jim on Valentine’s Day. She is suffering from diarrhea and is unable to eat. Rory no longer has a proper email account. Meg is taking her children skiing, but Lorelei resents the cost, especially since Megan stopped giving her money to stop her from spending it on “tat.”
15 February 2011
Lorelei is still unwell. She has decided to visit Jim, and Maddy persuaded her to do a dry run by staying at her place for a night. The thought almost gives Lorelei a panic attack, but she’s determined to see Jim. It has been helpful to talk with him about the past, which gives her strength.
April 2011
Meg, Molly, Beth, and Colin go to the funeral parlor. The undertakers prepared Lorelei’s body but put her in a pale blue dress that “an old lady would wear” (382). The children buy her an expensive silk chiffon dress in gemstone colors, which is more reflective of her personality. She looks thin but beautiful, though Meg sees her as “an awful shrunken-down witch, her unkept hair tamed into a long grey plait, her skin the colour of cement” (383). The nephew of a computer shop owner may be able to help unlock the password to her laptop. When they get back to the house, Rory has arrived.
Chapter 14 Summary
27 February 2011
Lorelei is feeling triumphant. She managed to spend the night at Maddy’s and is taking “baby steps” toward being able to leave the house to travel to Jim’s.
1 March 2011
Plans for Lorelei’s trip to meet Jim are shaping up. Feeling she can change with his support, she sold a ring to pay for the car to be serviced and is resisting shopping. She can’t wait to go to bed with him.
2 March 2011
Lorelei declines Jim’s offer to send her some money. She was going to spend another night at Maddy’s but has caught a bad cold, not realizing this is tuberculosis.
April 2011
Rory has spent six weeks at a Buddhist retreat, where there were 23 hours of silence each day. While there, he realized that several tragic events were his fault. He wasn’t a good brother to Rhys, and Kayleigh and Tia are with his father because he abandoned them. This led to the events at Vicky’s funeral, where Beth and Ben’s affair was revealed. His mother is dead because he didn’t come home to look after her. He is shocked by the state of the family house, but he is fine with sleeping on the floor while it’s being cleared.
Rory goes out with the family to a local pub where he and his friends used to drink underage. He wants to make amends and asks Colin if Tia would like to meet him again. He realizes he needs to grow up and apologize for not being a better brother to Rhys: “It’s time to stop running away from the fact and start dealing with it” (393). Each family member feels responsible for Rhys’s death, but Megan says, “‘It was none of us’ […] ‘It was all of us’” (394).
Chapter 15 Summary
12 March 2011
Lorelei’s cough is worse. She is too weak to eat and gets weaker because she’s not eating. She made a doctor’s appointment, but “Project Go and See Jim” has ground to a halt (395). She spent time in Rhys’s room and more memories are coming to the surface, but became nauseated when she remembered what happened on his last evening alive. She needs to face it and tell Jim what happened.
April 2011
The family eats together in Lorelei’s kitchen for the first time in years. They take photographs of the children’s art gallery before dismantling it. Rory thinks he has found the password for Lorelei’s laptop on a slip of paper: abc123mbrr: Megan, Bethan, Rory, Rhys. He adds this to the two little parcels left for him and Beth by Vicky and a pink Easter egg he found still lodged in the wall.
The computer shop owner’s nephew could not unlock the laptop, but the family tries the password Rory found, and it works.
Chapter 16 Summary
16 March 2011
Lorelei recounts what happened the night before Rhys died. They were playing board games downstairs, and he hadn’t been out of his room all day. She brought him a bowl of pudding and sat next to him on the bed and cuddled him because he looked lonely. He resisted her cuddle but then tried to kiss her. She fought him off and ran out of the room past Beth, “as though running from a monster” (405). She blames herself for not staying to talk to him about it. The next day was Easter Sunday. Lorelei wanted to discuss the incident with Colin but put it off. Vicky appeared with a bottle of red wine, and they got drunk together instead.
She tells Jim that she “didn’t just lose a son, you see. I lost a sense of myself as a mother. And a mother was the only thing I’d ever known how to be” (405). She pleads with him to write back quickly, as this is the hardest thing she’s ever done.
17 March 2011
Lorelei is ecstatic to receive an “emotionally intelligent” response from Jim, who makes connections between the “vaguely incestuous” threads that run through her life. She still has her chest infection, and the antibiotics aren’t working.
25 March 2011
This is the longest that Jim has not been in touch. Lorelei is distraught because she opened her emotional Pandora’s box and is not able to deal with its contents without his help.
31 March 2011
There is still no answer from Jim, and Lorelei asks if they are over. She is desperate.
6 April 2011
Lorelei can’t bear the house now that she’s let Rhys’s memory back in it. She is determined to find her way to Gateshead to see Jim. This is the last email she sends.
Chapter 17 Summary
April 2011
It’s Easter weekend, the first without Lorelei, and the extended family gathers at the house to clear it. Pandora arrives with her son Ben, and Lorelei’s other sister, Lorna, is there too. Vicky’s children, Sophie and Maddy, arrive as well. They gather at the kitchen table to eat and drink, and Megan notes that it’s a wonderful weekend.
By Monday, only Meg, Molly, Beth, Rory, and Colin remain. The house has been emptied and cleaned, and Megan thinks “It bore no relationship to the house she’d grown up in. it was so subdued and empty. So calm and elegant” (411).
Saturday 30 April 2011
Jim finally emails Lorelei the day after her funeral, which he attended. He explains why he didn’t reply to her last messages. Being ashamed, he hadn’t told her about his forthcoming trial for drunk and disorderly behavior, expecting he’d be given a fine. Instead, he was sent straight to jail, and he will never forgive himself for not being there when Lorelei needed him. They were taking “baby steps,” but in the end, they only had five months together. He is pleased to finally see the house he heard so much about and meet Lorelei’s children. He signs off affectionately, wanting to know when Beth’s baby is born.
Epilogue Summary
June 2011
Rory is living on Colin’s side of the house, and Beth has taken over Lorelei’s part. She has redecorated the place in her own style but also left some of her mother’s ornaments and paintings. Megan’s sons are staying in Rhys’s old room, which is “finally exorcised, finally just a room again” (418). The rest of the family arrives to meet “The newest Bird” (419), Elsa Athena Rose.
Chapters 13-17 and Epilogue Analysis
The chapters get increasingly short, propelling the action toward Lorelei’s death and the climax of the final revelation: the reason for Rhys’s suicide. This relates to the theme of Family Ties and the Cyclical Nature of Trauma. When Rory finds a slip of paper with the laptop password, he sees it as “A key. A way in” (401). The password literally unlocks Lorelei’s emails to Jim, but it also figuratively unlocks the family’s trauma; when they learn about Rhys’s incestuous feelings for Lorelei, they finally understand why he attempted suicide and can deal with their internalized guilt. With Jim’s support, albeit at a distance, Lorelei is gradually able to face the horror of that event as well as her difficult upbringing, events that contributed to her hoarding. Keys continue as a symbol in their conversation. She describes how everyone has a key buried deep within to help them change, but “in order for me to come to you and help you find your key I’d have to find my own first. It’s all just a series of tightly wound threads” (376). In unlocking her past, she gains the strength to move into her future. Ironically, this is at the point where her body becomes weaker, and she dies on the journey to see Jim. However, because of this emotional work, the house can be cleared and the family unlocks their trauma. They are still connected to the past but are released from its secrets.
While the extent of Rhys’s strange sexual behavior is only revealed in the climax, it is foreshadowed several times in the book. He lurks outside the girls’ changing rooms at school and Beth’s bedroom when she is showering. He is a loner, staying away from the rest of the family, especially Rory, who is the more popular twin. Likewise, he is Lorelei’s shadow, following her around and “looking to [her], for guidance, for approval, for everything, long after the others had lost interest in [her]” (405). However, Lorelei’s preoccupation with herself leaves him alone with his thoughts. When Lorelei cuddles him because he looks sad and lonely, he is overwhelmed by her attention and tries to kiss her. Lorelei’s tendency to run away from reality manifests here, and instead of dealing with the issue, she leaves “as though running from a monster” (405). The incident results in Rhys feeling abandoned, unable to process his feelings, likely ashamed and confused. The incident is the starkest example of the repercussions of burying problems rather than facing them outright, and it results in Rhys’s death, the only method of escape that he can envision. The trauma of Rhys’s suicide permanently changed Lorelei, who says she “lost a sense of myself as a mother. And a mother was the only thing I’d ever known how to be” (406). After this moment, she was never able to properly hug the children again.
Taking up the theme of Clarity Gained from Different Viewpoints, Jim’s “emotionally intelligent” response (407) allows Lorelei to make connections between her past and present. Shades of incestuous behavior color the Bird family history, from Beth sleeping with Meg’s husband to Colin getting together with his son’s ex; this shared theme in the family’s interpersonal relationships highlights the way trauma is cyclical, a fact Lorelei states outright when she calls it an “endless cycle.”
Another revelation comes in Lorelei’s emails when she confesses that her large family and home are her attempt to create a new life and family separate from her broken childhood. This motivation is the same as Meg’s, deepening the parallels between them. Even before Easter 1991, the house was “a depository for all of Lorelei’s deepest buried issues and emotional unrest” (412), and it was important to her to provide a different childhood from the one that she had. With Jim’s help, she is able to see that while Rhys’s suicide was the worst way for her coping mechanism to break, it was fragile to begin with because she never addressed the root of her issues. The past always impacts the present, and the psychological damage inflicted on her has gone on to affect all those she loves.
The closer Lorelei becomes to Jim, the more she is able to open up, taking steps toward healing like venturing outside her home and selling jewelry. When she finally gains the strength to enter Rhys’s uncluttered room, she feels his spirit. She could not confront his memory before, shown by her inability to visit his grave or have any of his photographs around, but as she comes to understand her emotions, she finally feels ready to deal with Rhys’s suicide. Just before her own death, she learns the value of staying and enduring rather than escaping.
In cleaning the house, the family learns this lesson as well. The house symbolizes trauma, and as they excavate its contents, they also confront and reconcile their memories and relationships. They go to the pub for the first time together, and when Rory apologizes to everyone for abandoning his brother, everyone discovers they each blame themselves. The guilt, like a tumor, is cut out, and now that the house has been exorcised of its past, it can start to become a happier place for the next generation. The house’s new life is represented in its new inhabitants; Beth and Rory each have a half, and Beth’s new child represents the family’s fresh start and unblemished hope for the future.
The next generation also embodies the way family endures and adapts. Alfie and Stanley resemble one another in the same way that Megan and Bethan had the “Bird face” as children, Tia looks like her father, and Molly resembles Rory. Even those who are not related by blood, such as Kayleigh and Vicky’s children, become incorporated into it. This is also true of Jim, who is taken into the fold, wanting to hear about the birth of Beth’s baby. This “newest Bird” (419), Elsa Athena Rose, shares a middle name with Lorelei’s stillborn baby sister. She symbolizes a connection with the past but also hope for the future.
For Rory, the house and particularly the garden are full of memories. He wants to make the place beautiful again, not just to make amends but to help him mature as an adult. He makes peace with his childhood, finds happy memories, and remembers how Lorelei gave the place soul and life. In the end, the family is united, and the house looks beautiful. The final imagery juxtaposes sharply with the way the house has been described for most of the book: “The kitchen was so cosy: the sun was shining through the leaded windows and casting rainbows about the place” (418). The rainbows call back to Lorelei, but they also symbolize new beginnings; in the Bible, for example, rainbows represent hope after destruction and the forgiveness of sin. The blending of past and present is also evident in Lorelei’s old room, where Beth now sleeps. She has made it her own with pink gingham curtains and baby pink rosebud-covered wallpaper, but she has also left out a few of her mother’s ornaments and paintings, symbolizing a connection to the past. Megan’s sons stay in Rhys’s old room, which is “finally exorcised, finally just a room again” (418), leaving a final image of the family’s healed trauma and unity.
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By Lisa Jewell
