The Truth About Forever

“But here in the present, my mother and I had no choice but to move ahead. We worked hard, me at school, her at outselling all the other builders. We parted our hair cleanly and stood up straight, greeting company—and the world—with the smiles we practiced in the quiet of our now-too-big dream house full of mirrors that showed the smiles back. But under it all, our grief remained. Sometimes she took more of it, sometimes I did. But always, it was there.”

This passage indicates the ways in which Macy and Deborah obsess over The Illusion of Perfection as one way the Diverse Manifestations of Grief present themselves. At the same time, it illustrates how much of an illusion it really is and how underneath it all, there is unresolved grief festering and growing more disruptive over time.

“I just stood there, holding my purse, suddenly entirely too aware of the nail I’d broken as I unfastened my seat belt in the parking lot. I’d put so much time into getting dressed for this first day, ironing my shirt, making my hair part perfectly straight, redoing my lipstick twice. Now, though, my nail, ripped across the top, jagged, seemed to defeat everything, even as I tucked it into my palm, hiding it.”

The broken nail that Macy fixates on symbolizes The Unpredictability of Life and the inevitable imperfections that will happen just by living. It also alludes to the realization Macy will later have that perfection is an impossible feat to achieve.

“Kristy handed me the tray of ham biscuits, plunking down a stack of napkins on its edge. This close to her, I still found my eyes wandering to her scars, but slowly I was getting used to them, my eyes drawn now and then to other things: the glitter on her skin, the two tiny silver hoops in each of her ears.”

Upon meeting Kristy, her scars are the only thing Macy can see, just like the metaphorical scars of Macy’s past are the only things people see after her father’s death. The alteration in her perception of Kristy shows that the more you get to know someone, the more they’ll be seen for things other than their scars. If Macy continues to keep people at a distance, all they’ll continue to notice about her is her father’s death.

“Jason. As I thought his name, I felt a pull in my gut and realized that for the last three hours or so, I’d forgotten all about our break, my new on-hold girlfriend status. But it had happened, was still happening. I’d just been too busy to notice.”

The imperfections and chaos of working with Wish effectively distract Macy from her break with Jason. The effect of Wish on her grief surrounding her relationship highlights how she similarly heals from the grief over her father.

“‘You know what happens when someone dies?’ Delia said suddenly […] ‘It’s like, everything and everyone refracts, each person having a different reaction. Like me and Wes. After the divorce, he fell in with this bad crowd, got arrested, she hardly knew what to do with him. But then, when she got sick, he changed. Now he’s totally different, how he’s so protective of Bert and focused on his welding and the pieces he makes. It’s his way of handling it.’”

In this passage, Delia effectively describes the Diverse Manifestations of Grief, not only between people but also between situations. Wes’s reaction to his parents’ divorce was much different from his behavior following his mother’s death, each situation eliciting different responses and coping mechanisms for him.

“It was our routine now, how she always asked me. As much part of the schedule as everything in my other life was, dependable, just like clockwork. We both knew our parts. But this time, I left the script, took that leap, and improvised.”

Kristy’s persistence gives Macy the opportunity to break out of her routines. It allows Macy the chance to improvise while also providing the stability of something certain, as Kristy never fails to ask Macy to join the group after catering jobs. The safety of another routine slowly transitions Macy into taking a step outside her comfort zone.

“I’d spent the last year and a half with Jason, shaping my life to fit his, doing what I had to in order to make sure I had a place in his perfect world, where things made sense. But it hadn’t worked.”

As Macy has more time away from Jason and spends more time around the Wish crew, she begins to see how imperfect her relationship was with him. Even while going out of her way to match her life to Jason’s, she continuously failed. This underscores yet another way in which attaining perfection is impossible.

“Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.”

This quote illustrates how heavy grief can be. The comparison of grief to an anchor carries the connotation of grief not allowing a person to move forward, holding them back from their potential and keeping them stagnant. This is the case for Macy and Deborah for the majority of the novel.

“[W]hile for her it meant how I’d push myself to be perfect, gotten good grades, scored the smart boyfriend, and recovered from my loss to be composed, together, fine just fine, for me, it worked in reverse. I’d been through so much, falling short again and again, and only recently had found a place where who I was, right now, was enough.”

Macy has leaned into chasing perfection because she believes it’s a way to take the pressure off. Yet all her efforts get her are the continuous feeling of failure and the added stress of attempting to attain something that isn’t possible. Macy’s character arc is determined by her finally realizing this for herself.

“Of course she’d think I could tell her anything: she was my mother. In truth, though, I couldn’t. I’d been wanting to talk to her for over a year about what was bothering me. I’d wanted to reach out to her, hold her close, tell her I was worried about her, but I couldn’t do that either. So it was just a formality, what we’d just agreed on, a contract I’d signed without reading the fine print. But I knew what it said. That I could be imperfect, but only so much. Human, but only within limits. And honest, to her or to myself, never.”

Macy’s relationship with her mother is strained after her father’s death. Both struggle with wanting control and perfection, and there’s an added stress when it’s not just Macy who expects it of herself but her mother, too. This erects barriers between them, distancing them from the steps they must take to heal.

“I had been putting up with this for weeks. Weeks. Why? Because I had an obligation? To whom? Not to Jason, who’d shed his commitment to me as easily as a second, ill-fitting skin. And certainly not to my mother, who, for all the time I’d suffered here, still thought I wasn’t dedicated enough. It just wasn’t worth it. Not even close.”

Toward the latter half of the novel, Macy’s character arc progresses. In this passage, she realizes that others’ expectations are far less important than her own satisfaction and happiness. This realization prompts her to quit her library job in pursuit of her own desires.

“My mother had to know I was unhappy. But it didn’t matter: all she cared about was that I was her Macy again, the one she’d come to depend on, always within earshot or reach. […] After dinner, I spent my hour and a half of free time alone, doing accepted activities. When I came home afterwards, my mother would be waiting for me, sticking her head out of her office to verify that, yes, I was just where I was supposed to be. And I was. I was also miserable.”

Macy has found a community and a job that makes her happy and helps her heal. In doing so, Deborah is convinced of her worst fear, that she’s lost control over her daughter and she’ll no longer be able to anticipate and perfect her life in every way possible. She reacts by doubling down in her jurisdiction over Macy’s life, but her way of dealing with her grief is harmful to Macy.

“Something’s going on, I thought, and immediately I flashed back to that night at the hospital, when I’d cried. Maybe it had been too much, and had freaked him out. We’d only talked on the phone since then, hadn’t seen each other. For all I knew, this change had happened ages ago, and I was only just catching up with it now.”

Despite the progression in Macy’s character arc, her old beliefs and habitual insecurities are still within grasp. At the first shift of Wes’s behavior, Macy immediately resorts to insecurities about showing too much humanity—a worry she struggled with often while with Jason. This illustrates how character growth and healing from grief are not linear, but winding.

“It wasn’t until I pulled onto the highway that it all really sunk in, how temporary our friendship had been. We’d been on our breaks, after all, but it wasn’t our relationships that were on pause: it was us. Now we were both in motion again, moving ahead. So what if there were questions left unanswered. Life went on. We knew that better than anyone.”

Aspects of the novel focus on the meaning of an ellipsis or, in reference to the title, “the truth about forever,” and as Macy recounts her relationship with Wes, these questions are brought back. Her entire relationship with Wes, past or future, is not defined by this one moment, but by every moment leading up to and after.

“After what happened with Wes, though, I’d stopped resisting my punishment. It was weird how, with things pretty much done between us, I could so easily go back to the life I’d had before. I found myself forgetting the girl I’d become, who’d been, if not fearless, not as afraid.”

Once again, the nonlinear trajectories of character growth and the healing process are explored when Macy no longer resists her mother’s punishments and picks up communication with Jason. Macy worries that she’ll forget how far she’s come and revert to once again being afraid of life and of risks.

“I didn’t worry so much about what he thought of what I wrote, what he might read between the lines. I didn’t race to answer him either, sometimes letting a day or two go before I replied, letting the words come at their own pace. When they did, I’d just type them up and hit Send, trying not to overthink.”

Macy’s character growth is emphasized by this passage, which mirrors her attempts to email Jason back at the beginning of the summer. Weeks prior, she hadn’t been able to draft an email without worrying about how he’d judge what she says, but now her responses to him are more of an afterthought than a source of anxiety.

“The more I pulled back, the more he seemed to move forward. I wondered if it was really because he cared about me, or if now I was just another challenge.”

When Macy begins to form feelings for Wes and pull away from Jason, Jason becomes more interested in her than ever before. Her suspicion that Jason views her as just another challenge rather than a girl he truly cares about and wants to be with only shows how uncertain their relationship has always been.

“I wanted to be able to say something that would make everything okay, but I had no idea what that might be. It’s not forever, she’d said, but to my mother, it might as well have been. She had made her choice, and this was it, where she felt safe, in a world she could, for the most part, control.”

Macy is beginning to see that nothing is forever if she doesn’t wish it to be, and Deborah still believes this to be so. The week at the beach house feels like forever to Macy’s mother, who knows the decision to face her late husband’s death will alter her life. She doesn’t yet understand that most things aren’t as permanent as she believes them to be.

“In a way, I was kind of grateful for all the various crises, if only because they kept me so busy. I didn’t have time to worry about things, such as the awkwardness of seeing Wes after all this time, or handling Jason, who was now planning to drop by to say hello at some point during the evening. I’d just deal with it when it happened, I told myself, and that would be soon enough.”

At the beginning of the novel, Macy’s handling of the disastrous gala and the inevitable confrontations with Jason and Wes shows her character growth over the summer. Macy is successfully Embracing the Unpredictability of Life and trusting that the situations will work themselves out.

“Wes was my friend, absolutely, but regardless of what I’d led him to believe, the night I’d seen him with Becky I’d felt more than what a friend should It was about time I admitted it. In fact, on some level, I’d known all along, which was what had almost sent me back to Jason, back to this neat, orderly life that I hoped would protect me from getting hurt again.”

Macy’s struggle to forward her character arc when faced with moments of adversity is authentic to her healing process. When Macy faces this conflict, she backslides into old habits but will ultimately make a recovery and continue her journey forward.

“Events conspired to bring you back to where you’d been. It was what you did then that made all the difference: it was all about potential.”

Macy begins to realize that one decision or event doesn’t dictate your entire life to a point of no return. This change in her viewpoint on life gives her a fresh perspective with which to face her own struggles.

“I realized how truly hard it was, really, to see someone you love change right before your eyes. Not only is it scary, it throws your balance off as well. This was how my mother felt, I realized, over the weeks I worked at Wish, as she began to not recognize me in small ways, day after day. It was no wonder she’d reacted by pulling me closer, forcibly narrowing my world back to fit inside her own. Even now, as I finally saw this as the truth it was, a part of me was wishing my mother would stand up straight, take command, be back in control. But all I’d wanted when she was tugging me closer was to be able to prove to her that the changes in me were good ones, ones she’d understand if only she gave them a chance. I had that chance now. And while it was scary, I was going to take it.”

Macy’s understanding of her mother’s grief and the thought processes behind it shows how interconnecting the grieving process can be across families. Not only is it difficult for Macy to heal herself, but it’s also difficult to cope with the unbalance of her mother’s different methods or altering timelines of healing.

“And then it hit me: he didn’t. He had no idea. And this thought was so ludicrous, so completely unreal, that I knew it had to be true. For Jason, there was no unexpected, no surprises. His whole life was outlined carefully, in lists and sublists, just like the ones I’d helped him go through all those weeks ago.”

Though Macy has been steadily losing interest in Jason for weeks, she has yet to see how he isn’t perfect. His certainty that they can figure out every issue that comes up in their relationship with a pre-made list is the moment Macy realizes that not even someone as seemingly perfect as Jason can completely control or anticipate every aspect of life.