50 pages • 1 hour read
Alice FeeneyGood Bad Girl: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Reimagining the Expectations of Motherhood
Very few of the mother-daughter relationships in Good Bad Girl reflect commonly held narratives about what “successful” motherhood should look like. Most of the novel’s mother-daughter relationships are defined by estrangement and surrogacy: Patience is estranged from both her biological and surrogate mothers, Clio is estranged from Edith, and Frankie is given up for adoption and then forcibly estranged from her biological mother by her grandmother when she attempts to reconnect. Though the precise reasons for these ruptures vary, they symbolically evoke the strain that societal pressures place on mother-daughter relationships.
Feeney principally uses Clio’s backstory to explore those societal pressures. When the police come to Clio’s house after the abduction, Clio reflects that they are all “Looking at her. Judging her. All thinking the same thing no doubt: Bad mother. They’re not wrong. That is how Clio thinks of herself too” (252). Even though the crime of Eleanor’s abduction was entirely outside of Clio’s control, she is still seen as liable for her child’s safety in a way that Clio’s husband is not. This unfair and illogical expectation marks her as an unsuccessful mother not only in the eyes of those around her but also in her own eyes: Clio, already struggling with motherhood due to postpartum depression, internalizes the sexist expectation that she alone is responsible for what happened to Eleanor, and the guilt she feels because of this comes to define her through the years that follow.
By the end of the novel, it is clearer than ever that traditional models of motherhood don’t work for most of the characters: Clio never finds a healthy, loving relationship with Edith, and Patience must accept that the woman she has always called her mother is her sister and that she committed a criminal and morally questionable act to become Patience’s mother. To begin the healing process and to find a way to live with one another, Patience, Frankie, and Clio must all let go of the expectations that they’ve attached to the idea of “motherhood.” This process begins for Patience when Liberty tells her that “you don’t have to give birth to a child to be their mother. I know plenty of people who do know their real mums and wish they didn’t” (263). Here, Liberty suggests that “motherhood” isn’t defined biologically but rather by a mother figure’s ability to love.
This shift in thinking about what motherhood is sees the protagonists reconfiguring their relationships at the end of the novel. In the final chapter, Patience and Frankie invite Clio into their home, and Patience gives Clio a handmade Mother’s Day card. This action demonstrates Patience’s newly nuanced attitude toward what motherhood can be for her. The card is an acknowledgment and acceptance of Clio as her biological mother, but her choice to live with Frankie shows that she sees Frankie as her chosen mother—the woman who can provide her with the love and safety she lacks for most of the novel. Notably, this ending also suggests that “motherhood” is a role that can be performed by a community, with the responsibilities and joys of the role being shared.
Navigating Ambiguous Moralities
The novel’s title, Good Bad Girl, is syntactically ambiguous: Both adjectives could modify “girl,” but “good” might also modify the phrase “bad girl,” implying that a girl can be “good” at being “bad.” This relates to one of the novel’s central thematic tensions: whether a good person can do bad things, and vice versa.
Most of the characters struggle with this question. Upon participating in Joy’s murder, Clio says, “This can’t be happening to me. I’m a good person” (297). The assumption underlying Clio’s statement is that a good person cannot do a bad thing—and, conversely, that by having done what she perceives to be a bad thing, Clio is now a bad person. Most of the novel’s other characters have also done bad things that cause them to question whether or not they are good people: Frankie kidnapped Patience, Patience robs and murders Joy, and Edith treated her children in ways that have permanently estranged them. All of these women must navigate the question of whether or not they can live with what they’ve done and whether their actions define them.
Edith has an answer to this question. When Clio bemoans that her actions might now make her a bad person, Edith responds, “Sometimes bad things happen to good people, so good people have to do bad things” (297). Edith suggests that “bad” actions are inevitable because the world is unjust; if this is the case, a bad action alone can’t be enough to label someone a “bad person.” Charlotte Chapman embraces this more fully than any other character in the novel. As the narrative’s detective, Charlotte embodies a social system that presupposes (and enforces) stark dichotomies between right/wrong and good/bad. In the end, though, Charlotte chooses not to pursue the truth of Joy’s murder even though she knows that Clio was involved in the crime. This choice suggests that Charlotte, like Edith, has concluded that not all bad actions should be punished. She doesn’t ascribe criminality to Clio or Patience, presumably believing that these women did something bad with the hopes of achieving something good—in this case, saving Edith. The criminal system she works for doesn’t accommodate the complicated moral calculus that she believes is necessary in this scenario. As Patience suggests in the novel’s closing lines, Charlotte lets them go because “some mysteries are not meant to be solved” (304).
The Plurality of Identity
One of the effects of the many familial estrangements in Good Bad Girl is that most of the protagonists lack self-knowledge: Patience quite literally doesn’t know the truth of her past, Frankie has given up on meeting her birth mother, and Clio is struggling to figure out who she can be in the wake of her divorce and the loss of her child. In the absence of certainty about who they are, the women create and inhabit identities that they feel are somehow false. Clio, for example, presents publicly as a brusque, commanding woman who has a strong sense of what she wants in life. In reality, she is lonely and deeply unmoored: “The person she presents to the world no longer has much in common with the person she has become” (73). This mask that Clio has created for herself is a way of coping with a life that she no longer feels she has any control over or any direction in.
Patience has also created a mask for herself; she has taken on a new identity entirely, both in name and occupation. Unlike Clio, however, Patience experiences little dissonance surrounding her constructed identity, instead following Edith’s mantra that “sometimes you have to pretend to be who people think you are to survive” (134). When living as Patience Liddell, Patience has access to a job that allows her to steal to survive; the renaming also allows her to hide from a past she wants to avoid for the time being. Her temporary identity therefore serves a highly strategic purpose; she understands the value of constructing an identity to achieve a specific end.
The fluidity of identity also affords characters chances to bring their outer and inner selves into better alignment. Besides being strategic, “Patience Liddell” is a highly expressive persona. She chooses the name “Patience” because she feels it reflects the qualities that her life has demanded of her: She has needed to be endlessly patient to discover the truth of her parentage. The surname “Liddell” is a reference to the titular character of Alice in Wonderland and thus speaks to Patience’s experience of feeling thrown into a world she doesn’t fully understand after learning that Frankie isn’t her biological mother. By donning the “Patience Liddell” identity, Patience creates a space in which she can work through these feelings of being disconnected from her mother. The identity itself is a temporary construction; when Patience feels able to reconnect with Frankie and accept Clio into her life, she casts Patience aside and resumes her life as Nellie. Patience’s experience suggests that constructed identities are not simply masks used to hide inner turmoil; rather, they can be a stepping stone en route to a new life and a more cohesive sense of self.
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By Alice Feeney
