How to Kill Your Family

Grace continues to fulfill the genre expectations she meets in the novel’s first five chapters, illustrating the close relationship between Pride and Miscalculation. Her feelings about Kelly are unchanged, and she even gives her cellmate a spoon into which she has carved the initials of her victims. Grace is confident no one will “look that closely” (87) especially Kelly, whom she regards as unintelligent. She admits this was “Not a particularly sophisticated move” (87), but she never seems to consider that she has essentially handed an unscrupulous person—one who has already been convicted of blackmail multiple times—evidence of her crimes. Grace continues to write her story, reveling in the pride it gives her, even as she acknowledges her total lack of privacy, “especially with a cellmate like [hers]” (88), because all prisoners trade in secrets and information. Though Kelly was a successful blackmailer, Grace calls her a “stupid cow” who could not pull off a more “elegant” crime. Grace thinks of her own crimes, by contrast, as well-planned and principled—the results of her “strong need to right a wrong” (88), as though her background and purpose give her the moral and intellectual high ground. When a handsome runner smiles at her, she assumes he is hoping for a romance and swiftly dismisses the idea because she doesn’t have “the time or the energy to sit and play romance on the sun-drenched steps of a church” (146). She has low expectations of men, in part, because she believes herself to be intellectually superior to them. This dismissal is also self-protective—a way for Grace to maintain The Illusion of Control. The vision of “playing romance” is sarcastic, but it also suggests a fantasy of romantic happiness that she can’t allow herself to indulge in for fear of losing what she thinks of as her perfect emotional autonomy. When does engage in sex, she rationalizes it to herself as a means of increasing her control. She sleeps with Jimmy, who has been her best friend since childhood, to make him “prize [their] relationship even more fiercely” than he did already (100)—a means to keep him close until she is ready for a commitment. Like her other attempts at control, this one backfires when Jimmy becomes engaged to Caroline.

There’s no question that Grace is extremely intelligent, a quality conveyed by the quantity and variety of allusions she makes throughout the text, and her intellect bolsters her sense of superiority over just about everyone. When she cringes inwardly at having to talk about sex with her uncle, she cites a line spoken by Marianne Dashwood from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Marianne, complaining about the indignities to be endured while residing cheaply on a cousin’s estate, says, “The rent here may be low but I believe we have it on very hard terms” (123). Grace quotes this line to convey that her plans for Lee are not necessarily difficult, but they come with an emotional and psychological cost in that she is compelled to discuss her uncle’s fetish with him. Later, she cites many respected authors of feminist literature including Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sylvia Plath, and she credits “reading about other angry women” with making her “bolder, allow[ing] [her] to nurture [her] anger, [to] see it as a worthy and righteous thing” (125). In the first five chapters, Grace’s allusions range from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth to Alexandre Dumas’s revenge novel The Count of Monte Cristo to Patrick Bateman, the murderer-protagonist of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho—a toxically masculine antihero some reviewers have cited as a literary predecessor and foil to Grace. In Chapter 9, Grace compares her own writing to that of Oscar Wilde, who wrote De Profundis from his prison cell, acknowledging the genius of one line in particular while disparaging his intellect on the whole because, as “an educated white man, […] the bar for genius isn’t set impossibly high here” (160). Her criticism suggests that it doesn’t take much for society to find an educated white man fascinating and that her own standards are much higher. Her assessment of the Artemis family’s intellectual faculties is best showcased by her response to their library. She says, “Bookshelves lined the walls, stuffed with leather-bound volumes bought for show. I doubted anyone in this family had read the complete works of Dickens, let alone a volume by Derrida. Oh God, alphabetised” (103). She sneers at the idea that any Artemis has read the novels of Charles Dickens, a popular English author, not to mention any text by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, though both can be found on their shelves. Grace even criticizes the library’s organization, finding alphabetization somewhat less cerebral than arranging them by genre or time period, for example. This is, in general, the critical lens through which she views most people, both those who have wronged her and those who have not. Her many and varied allusions highlight her intellect as well as her pride, which underwrites her wish for others to recognize her cleverness.