Eliza and Her Monsters

“That computer is my rabbit hole; the internet is my wonderland.

I am only allowed to fall into it when it doesn’t matter if I get lost.”

By alluding to the Alice in Wonderland novels, Eliza places herself in the tradition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. She demonstrates a higher degree of self-awareness than Alice ever did, though, because Eliza knows about her own tendencies to “get lost” and takes steps to manage them.

“But I don’t want to be friends with people who have already decided I’m too weird to live. Maybe if they knew who I am and what I’ve made, maybe then they wouldn’t think I was so weird. Maybe then the weird would just be eccentric. But the only person I can be in this school is Eliza Mirk, and Eliza Mirk is barely a footnote in anyone’s life. Including mine.”

Eliza’s first-person voice conveys her struggle with self-worth. She doesn’t believe that she’s worthy of anyone’s time and refers to herself as a “footnote” in the lives of others. Her self-described marginality belies her status as the main character in the novel and in her own life and suggests the extent to which she finds online spaces to be a safer site for enacting her identity.

“Travis looks like a sapling standing next to an oak.”

Eliza’s first impression of Wallace’s physical appearance is expressed as a simile, where Travis seems both smaller and less mature than the other boy. Already, Eliza associates Wallace with stability, foreshadowing the role he will play in her life.

“He has divined the things I thought while drawing this comic and put them down on paper. I don’t understand it, and I don’t know how this chain of events happened. But Wallace Warland can do magic. Actual, real magic. With words.”

Wallace’s character is a talented writer, as this description implies, but he is also quite clearly an excellent reader who has long been attuned to Eliza’s sense of her own words. Eliza’s first experience of being deeply understood feels like “magic.”

“There is a small monster in my brain that controls my doubt.

The doubt itself is a stupid thing, without sense or feeling, blind and straining at the end of a long chain. The monster, though, is smart. It’s always watching, and when I am completely sure of myself, it unchains the doubt and lets it run wild. Even when I know it’s coming, I can’t stop it.”

Eliza conceptualizes her anxiety as a monster capable of unleashing the brute force of “doubt” anytime she feels too confident. She doesn’t feel capable of controlling these forces, which she sees as being separate from the rest of her identity, though clearly present and threatening.

“My heart juts out a staccato rhythm in my chest and my stomach sloshes around like the great foaming tides of Orcus.”

Eliza uses her own writing as the subject of her simile, revealing how Monstrous Sea informs the way she understands the rest of her life. In this, she is similar to many members of her fandom, who also draw on the language of MS to explain their feelings and sensations. Thus, although it might seem that she has a proprietary right to “the great foaming tides of Orcus,” the metaphor places her within a community of readers rather than singling her out.

“I learned years ago that it’s okay to do this. To seek out small spaces for myself, to stop and imagine myself alone. People are too much sometimes. Friends, acquaintances, enemies, strangers. It doesn’t matter; they all crowd. Even if they’re all the way across the room, they crowd.”

Despite Eliza’s social anxiety in the offline world, she’s insightful enough to know her limits and carve out quiet sections for herself. Significantly, her anxiety does not allow her to distinguish between friendly and unfriendly spaces; all real-life attention is potentially dangerous.

“‘I think that’s why they call it a breakthrough. It cracks you open and lets light in.’

He looks up and smiles. ‘Yeah. Exactly.’”

Eliza and Wallace bond over their shared love of Monstrous Sea, which gives them a common language for talking about their experiences. They also engage in the shared activity of literary analysis, as they think about the words that they read (and, in Eliza’s case, write).

“You found me in a constellation.”

Eliza considers this the second most popular quote from Monstrous Sea, one that her fans have adopted and used on everything from phone cases to wedding ceremonies. She herself has trouble articulating exactly what it means, but she can see that people seem to identify with and aspire to the mutual understanding it expresses.

“Davy climbs back up on the bed and watches me like when am I going to come back and hold him like a stuffed animal again?”

The book has many moments of humor, including this moment with Eliza’s dog Davy—the inspiration for a sea monster in MS. Davy helps Eliza move among different worlds. He is her companion when she works on her comic but also gives her a reason to be outdoors. He also connects her to other people: When Eliza first meets Wallace’s family, his sister connects her with Davy, who goes to the doggy day care where she works.

“Creative writing isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

Wallace’s stepfather, Tim, expresses the views of many parents of college-bound high school seniors, but Wallace’s backstory means Tim’s words land particularly hard. Tim doesn’t know how unhappy Wallace’s father was in his job or have any idea that Wallace promised his father that he wouldn’t pursue a similarly unfulfilling career. The fact that Wallace has already attracted the interest of a publisher for his Monstrous Sea transcription further indicates the wrongness of Tim’s assumption.

“What’s the point of being alive if you don’t do what makes you happy? What good is a career that makes you money if you hate yourself every day you do it?”

Wallace’s questions act as a key theme of the book. They may be the central dramatic questions of the novel, especially in regard to happiness. Eliza and Wallace both need to find their joy and self-worth, no matter if anyone else approves.

“I’ve done enough hiding in my life. I hide from my classmates all day long.

I hide from my parents, my brothers, even my friends.

I might be hiding LadyConstellation from Wallace under the guise of Eliza Mirk, but it’s not LadyConstellation he’s kissing right now.

It’s Eliza. It’s me.

I don’t want to hide this part of myself anymore.”

Kissing Wallace suddenly reveals to Eliza that she wants to have a less fragmented identity. She has always believed that LadyConstellation represents the best of who she is—a person she can never be in real life—but she’s stunned to realize that Wallace likes Eliza as Eliza. The possibility that Eliza could have some of LadyConstellation’s best qualities makes her want to merge those identities, even if she isn’t sure how.

“I’ve been living with them their whole lives, but until right now, they’ve felt like strangers.”

Hearing her younger brothers whisper to each other in the tent makes Eliza see how wrapped up she has been in her work and how much of herself she keeps back from her family because she assumes they won’t understand. She’s struck both by what her brothers wonder about her and by their closeness to each other; they are only 11 months apart, while she is several years older.

“Who isn’t obsessed with the things they create, they love? Ideas are the asexual reproduction of the mind.”

This quote encapsulates some of the tensions between The Creative Process and the Demands of Fandom. Eliza sees creation as an act of love; it’s hard for her to understand it any other way. However, part of that kind of creation is that it can remain personal and doesn’t have to be shared; it is “asexual reproduction” that can be controlled. She has a harder time getting her head around loving Wallace because she does share him with others and because he is not her creation.

“‘There’s more to life than stories, Eliza.’

She says it like it’s simple. She says it like I have a choice.”

Although Eliza’s parents mean well, they often insult what she believes is her life purpose because they don’t know any better. Eliza’s practices of concealment mean that she can’t easily point out their mistakes without having to reveal more of herself than she wants to, so instead she has to settle for hating their platitudes.

“I stumble into the hallway. Wallace is gone. The floor sways back and forth, and blackness creeps on the edges of my vision.”

When Eliza spends time with Wallace at other points in the novel, she often comments on how being near him makes her more aware of her physical body than she usually is. Now that Wallace knows she is LadyConstellation and has walked away from her in anger, she feels his absence as a physical sensation as well, foreshadowing her fainting episode in the cafeteria. Figuratively, Eliza can be seen to be unsteady because she now has too much of an identity in Wallace’s eyes; their relationship also threatens to collapse under the apparent contradictions of what, in the novel’s opening lines, Eliza had called a “paradox.”

“Truth is the worst monster, because it never really goes away.”

Eliza classes truth with those other monsters, doubt and anxiety. Like those, Eliza feels that she can’t control the truth or keep it at bay forever.

“The things you care most about are the ones that leave the biggest holes.”

Eliza’s longest relationship with anyone and anything outside her family is with Monstrous Sea itself. She feels the potential untimely loss of that relationship—that identity—even more strongly than she does the potential of losing Wallace, though that’s a close second. More than she has up until this point, she understands that loss is the price of caring about things and people.

“Here is your canvas—how creative can you be? What limits can you stretch to bring to life that creature in your head? A blank piece of paper is infinite possibilities.”

Eliza tries to talk herself back into creativity so that she can finish Monstrous Sea for Wallace’s sake. However, her usual belief in the possibility contained in a blank page doesn’t work this time around, as she experiences the anxiety of not knowing what to draw. For Eliza, that uncertainty threatens her entire identity because she has tied her self-worth so closely to her creative work.

“I can’t cry and I can’t draw and I can’t get online and I can’t talk to anyone, so what good am I? What is the point of me?”

Eliza’s mental health deteriorates as she struggles to create new work. Her usual outlets for creativity and social interaction are not available to her, and she wonders who she can be without them. If she has to be just “Eliza,” she’s not sure she’s really anything. The use of polysyndeton (multiple conjunctions) to link a string of clipped statements builds tension in anticipation of Eliza asking the final rhetorical question. This adds immediacy to the novel’s portrayal of her mental state, highlighting the danger she is in.

“Worth as a person is not based on any tangible evidence. There’s no test for it, no scale. Everyone’s got their own idea of what it is. But I can tell you that Monstrous Sea is not the measure of your value in life, Eliza. Whether or not you finish it does not determine if you should live or die.”

Eliza’s therapist helps her begin to separate her sense of identity and self-worth from her ability to create Monstrous Sea—or anything else. Eliza does not need to produce evidence that she is a valuable person; that value comes from her being her.

“Like life, what gives a story its meaning is the fact that it ends. Our stories have lives of their own—and it’s up to us to make them mean something.”

The postscript to Olivia Kane’s letter to Eliza answers Eliza’s question about what the ending of Children of Hypnos would have been—without revealing what that ending was. Olivia says that she always wrote with an ending in view and that the knowledge that everything ends is more important than how it does so. She also implies that creators can’t stay in control of their stories once they’re out in the world; their creations have “lives of their own,” and many people will add their own meanings along the way.