Good Bad Girl: A Novel

“The cut and shape and feel of the cool metal in her hands bring comfort. She likes to push individual keys into the tips of her fingers until they hurt and leave a mark. Feeling something—even pain—is better than feeling nothing at all.”

Here, Feeney characterizes Frankie through the mundane objects that Frankie interacts with. This passage gives insight into both Frankie’s numbness in the months after her daughter’s departure and the self-destructive tendencies that begin to manifest during this time.

“Prisons come in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes we build our own without realizing.”

At this stage of the novel, Edith’s comment seems to be an observation about her living arrangements at the care home. However, this notion of self-created prisons becomes a central symbolic lens for understanding how Edith, Clio, Frankie, and Patience have all limited their own growth by making assumptions about what they can/can’t achieve; they have not yet learned to capitalize on The Plurality of Identity.

“It’s as though this fiftysomething woman, this version of her daughter she barely recognizes, gobbled up the good one. Her good little girl grew up to be bad.”

This language of consumption illustrates how Edith thinks about change and explains why she interacts with people the way she does. Edith sees the adult Clio as having destroyed the past version of Clio whom Edith loved. Edith knows she can’t bring that child back to life; instead, she must find ways of connecting with this woman she no longer loves.

“Sometimes bad people are just sad people in disguise.”

This quote touches on one of the novel’s central themes: the idea that identities are constructed and that people are in a constant state of change. As Patience begins to grasp this, she starts to become more empathetic.

“I’ve got used to ducking down at all times to avoid hitting my head. Sometimes we all have to become smaller versions of ourselves to fit the story life writes for us.”

This quote shows how powerless Frankie feels in her own life. Other characters talk about life as a narrative—but as a narrative they are writing. Frankie removes her own agency here, talking about life as though an exterior force were writing her life for her.

“Something for nothing can dilute most forms of disappointment. But nothing in life is ever free, not really. Clio thinks most people would be far happier if they accepted that fact.”

Clio’s attempt to appease Frankie, who she assumes is a disgruntled client, speaks to the cynicism with which Clio approaches the world. Clio sees life as transactional: To gain something, one must give something else up. This is why Clio interacts with other people in such a brusque, dismissive manner.

“But living under the same roof wasn’t a good idea: the house is too small (a lie), the stairs are too steep and narrow (the truth), it is where Clio works and she doesn’t have time to keep checking up on/caring for her mother (a lie and the truth).”

The parentheticals in this quote speak to how Clio convinces herself that she’s doing the right thing even when she knows that she isn’t, developing the theme of Navigating Ambiguous Moralities. Clio deludes herself by mixing lies with the truth, creating a narrative she can believe and justify to herself.

“The worst parts of our history have a bad habit of repeating themselves.”

This quote encompasses one of the novel’s core ideas—the notion that traumas are intergenerational, causing people to repeat the behaviors of their parents/grandparents. Here, Frankie worries that it’s mostly the worst aspects of one’s family history that endure.

“‘I know that,’ she snaps, although I’m not convinced she did. ‘This small world of ours has shrunk into a small town.’ I’m not sure what she means, but then she softens into the version of Edith I know.”

Edith momentarily forgets that she’s familiar with Covent Garden, the area where her estranged son works. Her comment about small worlds becoming small towns is—as Patience points out—open to interpretation, but it speaks to how her world has shrunk in her old age. Edith’s age keeps her from being as active and investigative as she once was; as a result, her world begins to feel smaller and smaller.

“I think we all start off as blank canvasses before the world paints us with thoughts and feelings we pretend are our own. And I like that. It means we are capable of change.”

Patience’s simile reflects her artistic background and the lens through which she views the world. Patience takes what could be a deeply cynical thought—that people are passive vessels receiving whatever emotions and ideas life impresses on them—and finds a positive way of reinterpreting the idea. This demonstrates Patience’s tireless optimism, which her chosen name evokes.

“I suppose we’re all detectives in the story of our own lives. All searching for clues about why we are here, piecing together fragments of our existence, trying to solve what and how and why we are compared with who we should be.”

This quote circles back to the key motif of life being a narrative. Patience’s understanding of her life narrative as a detective story speaks to the agency she feels in her own life. If she is the detective of her own story, she is the one with the power to make sense of what seems incomprehensible.

“When someone you love becomes someone you can’t, it is the very worst kind of heartbreak.”

Here, Edith points to the downside of the novel’s central assertion that all people are capable of change. Change isn’t always a good thing for all people; Edith has seen that sometimes as people grow up, they go away from the ones who loved them.

“Frankie imagines the same family working in this building for all those years, generation after generation, following in the ancestors’ footsteps. Walking in so many shadows must make it hard to see your own path.”

This quote speaks to how overburdened Frankie feels by the weight of familial history. Learning the truth of her own past led Frankie to the trials she’s now facing, which she feels helpless to overcome; she imagines that other people must feel the same way.

“I don’t wait to hear the rest of his speech; the world is too full of men who like the sound of their own voices.”

This novel is very much concerned with the way families and communities of women learn to grow together; men are almost entirely absent from the plot. Jude is one of the only men who speaks, and his presence is a reminder of the patriarchal social structures that create the shame and fear that many women must cope with.

“But she did want to be liked by Ladybug. Loved even, foolish as that might have been. Maybe deep down we all want to be loved. Maybe we need to be.”

Edith’s character arc happens primarily in the novel’s backstory. Moments like this one emphasize just how thoroughly Edith has changed. While she was once entirely emotionally distant from her children, she now allows herself to be vulnerable enough to desire love from her granddaughter.

“Strangers tend to see different versions of the people we love.”

This observation from Clio speaks to the novel’s thoughts about subjectivity. Clio seems to suggest that love has a way of warping one’s perspective on a person; a stranger, Clio believes, can perceive a loved one more objectively.

“The perspective of youth is rarely level. Young people tend to look up to or down on their elders rather than viewing someone older as an equal.”

Frankie’s observations about how Liberty interacts with her offer a lens for understanding the miscommunications between all characters of different generations. The novel’s young women are often unable to see their mothers as humans faced with difficult decisions, and this inability to empathize can lead to estrangements.

“The initial outpouring of support when they lost their child—in the form of cards, flowers, phone calls, casseroles—all stopped in the end. People soon tire of trying to help when they realize they can’t.”

Clio’s experience of mourning the loss of a child reflects on the superficial ways in which society supports struggling women—particularly mothers, who also bear the weight of societal expectation. The socially sanctioned ways of performing empathy are insufficient for helping with grief as profound as Clio’s.

“The way some lives continue to happily unfold while others implode has always fascinated her. Is it luck? Fate? Destiny? Is it really just about being the right person in the right place at the right time? She often felt like the wrong person in the wrong place, maybe that’s why things rarely seem to go right for her.”

Frankie begins to reflect on her own agency in life. Even though “fate” and “destiny” are external forces, she’s asking the questions that will spur her to take control for herself.

“I might have been a mere store detective, but I learned how to watch people and see who they really are beneath the disguises we all wear.”

Edith provides her own commentary on the novel’s theme of constructed identities. Her use of “disguises” suggests that Edith, like Patience, sees identities as strategic. Unlike Patience, she implies that the goal of identity construction is ultimately about deceit and deception rather than growth.

“One of the many problems, in my opinion, is that you’ve forgotten the art of listening. You know how to use your eyes, staring at your screens all day, but you don’t use your ears.”

Edith’s critique of Charlotte Chapman’s generation is also a critique of how women of different generations fail to empathize with one another. Nearly every woman in the text—Edith included—forgets to listen to the needs and fears of other women. This failure often results in the kinds of social fractures that drive the novel’s conflict.

“The maps inside our minds that lead to happiness and sadness are all self-made. We are not born with mapped-out lives, we are cartographers of our own destiny.”

Clio’s metaphor about life-as-a-map shifts the novel’s central motif of life-as-a-narrative. The map metaphor suggests that the cartographer has a great deal of agency in determining what their life will look like. Moreover, a map doesn’t have a set beginning and end: Mapping is an act of exploration. This new metaphor suggests that Clio has come to a healthier sense of how to use her own agency.

“So many of their faces are painted with worry, fear, and pain. But some show signs of optimism or even joy.”

In this description of Clio watching people on the street, the word “painted” is telling. This diction suggests that Clio still sees emotions as a kind of mask—a construction that people hide behind.