In A Dark Dark Wood

“Clare always did like secrets. Her favorite pastime was finding out something about you and then hinting at it. Not spreading it around—just veiled references in conversation, references that only you and she understood. References that let you know.”

Nora wonders why Clare has invited her to the hen do and why Clare wants to see her now. This passage indicates that Clare has always been a manipulator, even when the girls were children. Knowing other people’s secrets and weaknesses empowers Clare, and she embraces this positionality in her friends’ lives.

“I couldn’t tell Nina how it had made me feel, having strangers downstairs picking over my past with Clare, like someone picking at the edges of a half-healed wound.”

Nora feels tense and claustrophobic after the “how do you know Clare?” introductions have taken place among the party guests. Nora wants to keep her past buried, but having to explain how she became friends with Clare has dredged it all up again. Nora conceals her private past life as much as possible, so having it exposed feels painful.

“Of course Clare had known me. She’s known me since I was five. That was exactly the problem—she knew me too well. She saw through the thin adult veneer to the scrawny, frightened child beneath.”

When Nora asks Clare to call her “Nora,” rather than “Lee,” Clare replies that it will be hard, after knowing her as the latter for so long. Nora instinctively thinks that Clare never really knew her, but then mentally corrects herself, thinking that Clare knows her too well. Being around Clare, who knows all of Nora’s flaws and insecurities better than anyone, is the most disturbing part of this reunion. Nora has cultivated a new persona for 10 years, which Clare is immediately able to push through. This again shows how Nora feels that Clare can easily manipulate her emotions.

“All night I had been trying to connect the boy I’d known with the Clare of today, and this only brought into sharp focus the strangeness of it all.” 

Part of Nora’s shock in learning that Clare is marrying James is her difficulty in seeing them as a couple. Clare was her best friend, but Nora knows her to be very shallow. The James that Nora knew and loved in school was principled, deep-thinking, and uninterested in things like high fashion and society. Nora can’t reconcile her memories of James with the person Clare and Tom keep describing.

“I hadn’t stammered since I left school. Somehow I had shed it, along with the sad, awkward personality of Lee, the moment I stepped out of Reading. Nora had never stammered. I was slipping back into Lee.”

Stammering was part of the “old Nora,” the Nora who was “Lee” in school. However, as the guests share stories and memories, Nora feels herself slipping back into her old, awkward self. As the guests dredge up her past, Nora’s school age self resurfaces.

“I never forgot Clare’s action that first day. She could have chosen anyone. She could have played the popularity card and sat with one of the girls with Barbie clips in their hair and Lelli Kelly shoes. Instead, she chose the one girl who was sitting silent, by herself, and she transformed me.”

Nora remembers how she met Clare for the first time, in kindergarten. Nora put up with Clare’s self-centered nature and acts of muted cruelty because she remembered how Clare had “plucked” her out of loneliness and friendlessness. Clare had given her, by extension, a happy childhood. It is clear now that Clare chose Nora because she was weak and could make Clare feel strong in comparison. Clare later keeps Flo as her best friend, for similar reasons.

“And most important of all, never, never point a gun at anyone, loaded or unloaded.”

There are many instances of foreshadowing in the story, particularly regarding the shooting of James. Tom immediately calls the shotgun over the mantle “Chekhov’s gun” as a joke, which directly identifies the trope used in the story: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.” Flo maintains that the gun contains blanks, not live ammunition. Later, the shooting range instructor gives the group safety instructions and directs Flo to never to point a gun at anyone. However, in an ironic twist, Flo shoots James using a live shell that Clare took from the range. 

“Clare watched them from the far sofa, and I found myself watching her, remembering how she loved to observe, how she used to throw a remark out, like a pebble into a pond, and then back quietly away to watch the ripples as people scrapped it out.”

This is another example of how Clare is a manipulative person who enjoys the power of controlling other people. Although Clare has carefully cultivated her persona of being a caring, generous friend, her desire to slyly create conflict for others motivates many of her seemingly benign actions.

“‘People don’t change,’ Nina said bitterly. ‘They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.’” 

Nina understands the side of Clare that is manipulative and callous. Nina has never forgiven Clare for publicly outing her as gay when they were teens. Clare claimed she had done so for Nina’s own good, so she would no longer “live a lie.” However, Nina believes Clare did this for her own amusement. Confronted with this memory, Nora tries to say that perhaps Clare has changed, but Nina knows better. Clare proves to be the same schemer she was in school.

“I began to wonder if Clare had told someone what had happened. […] And by the time the two hours was up, I knew what I had to do. Because I knew that the doubt would send me insane. I never went back.”

After Nora had an abortion and returned to school to take her exams, she became paranoid that Clare told the others about what had transpired between her and James. Nora read into the actions and words of a girl in her class and could not shake the feeling that she was alluding to Nora’s situation. This prompted Nora to leave the school and break off contact with everyone there, in her desperate attempt to put her tragedy with James behind her.

“The brain doesn’t remember well. It tells stories. It fills in the gaps, and implants those fantasies as memories.”

Nora desperately tries to remember the details surrounding the night before her accident. She is afraid that since she can’t remember, her brain will start to make up stories to fill in the gaps. Since she is a crime novelist, Nora feels that she is even more prone to inventing a narrative. Nora later feels that she has no choice but to escape from the hospital and return to the Glass House, to reconstruct her memories.

“It seems like a hundred years ago, swathed in a fog of adrenaline as we all crept around the house, half hysterical with a mixture of drunken excitement and genuine fear.”

Once Nora remembers that Flo shot James, she tries to piece together what happened after the shooting. Just thinking back to that evening is difficult for Nora, as all her memories jumble together and blur. The metaphor of fog is an apt one here, as her shrouded memories are inaccessible to her.

“He is gone—and, just when I need it most, so is the rage I have nursed all this time, even while I told myself that I no longer cared, that it was a part of my past shut away and gone and done.”

Nora mourns the loss of James, with whom she has been so angry for so long. All her anger melts away in the wake of his death, and she feels laid bare and defenseless in her grief. Being angry allowed her to tell herself that she no longer loved James, that he was a part of her past, but now that emotional armor is gone.

“The thought that I’d loved him so much, and had been so mistaken. How could I? How could I have been so incredibly, unbelievably wrong?”

In her narration, Nora finally reveals the reason that she and James broke up, and why she has carried so much pain for the past decade. Nora explains that James sent her a cruel text after she told him about her pregnancy. Devastated, Nora broke off ties with everyone she knew from school so that no one would ever know the truth. Nora felt stupid for believing that James loved her. This text set in motion all the developments in Nora’s subsequent life, as she structured her life to hold people at a distance. The guilt Nora feels about having abandoned Clare makes her accept the invitation to the hen do, an act which leads to James’s death.

“I am trying not to panic, but I know my voice has got shaky and shrill. They know. They know something I don’t. ‘What happened?’”

The police accuse Nora of conspiring to murder James. After seeing the incriminating texts, Nora feels more bewildered and afraid. Now, when Detective Lamarr tells her that the analysis report of Clare’s car further implicates her, Nora truly panics. With no clear recollection of the events in question, Nora can’t defend herself. This passage highlights Nora’s elevated desperation.

“I try to look at this like the plot of one of my books. If I were writing this, I could imagine a reason for Tom to hurt James. And I could probably manufacture a motive for him to hurt Clare in the process. But me? Why go to all these lengths to bring in someone he doesn’t even know?”

Nora systematically examines the evidence to rule out suspects. Since Nora writes crime novels, she tries to think like one of the police detectives she interviewed while working on her plots. Here, she eliminates Tom as a suspect, as part of the process of figuring out who has tried to frame her for James’s death.

“What has really knocked me off balance is this: someone hates me enough to do this. But who?”

The evidence that someone is trying to frame her for James’s death shakes Nora to her core. Someone has gone to great lengths to have to police point to her, such as sending texts from her phone. Nora grapples with the idea that someone hates her so much to commit murder and elaborately plot Nora’s criminal implication. 

“It’s not a desire to live—I don’t care about that anymore. James is dead and Clare is hurt. Flo is dying. There is only one thing left—and that is the truth.” 

Nora pushes herself to the limits of her physical and emotional endurance to get to the house. She hopes the house will prompt her memories. At first, she tries to get to the house to regain her memories with the intention of defending herself to the police. However, as she increasingly suffers from pain, cold, and exhaustion, the quest for the truth propels her forward.

“Standing here, in my own footsteps, the thoughts shoot across my brain just as they did that night, and I can remember them: it’s like watching the snow melt and seeing the familiar landscape emerge from beneath.” 

Physically reconstructing the events surrounding James’s death finally breaks Nora’s amnesia and helps her recall her blurry, incomplete, or simply missing memories. It’s a revelation for Nora to finally remember what she has tried so hard to recollect.

“I am a runner. This is what I do—I run. But sometimes you can’t run anymore.”

Running is a recurrent motif in the story. Nora is an avid runner and uses it as a kind of therapy to relieve stress and frustration. She also routinely runs away from her past. In this scene, Nora has a strong urge to run when she hears the person whom she assumes to be James’s murderer come into the house, as part of her usual inclination towards self-preservation. However, Nora decides not to run away from the truth and stands her ground.

“And then suddenly, amid the swimming haze of memories and tangled suspicion—something catches.” 

After 10 long years, Nora finally understands that Clare sent the breakup text Nora thought was from James. Nora grasps that the act of Clare sending the fake text set all the tragic events in motion, from her leaving school and all her friends to James’s death. As the pieces finally fall into place in her mind, Nora can see the big picture.

“She could come out of this destroyed—or she could kill James and walk away a tragic and inspiring young widow, ready to start again.”

Even when Nora first suspects Clare as the force behind James’s murder, she fails to identify Clare’s motivation. Once Nora realizes that Clare needed to conceal her true nature and past actions to protect her reputation, she fully comprehends who Clare is and why Clare chose to eliminate James.

“Clare never stopped acting. Even saw a small child she was acting a part, the part of a good friend, the part of the perfect student, the ideal daughter, the glamorous girlfriend. […] Because she was, quite literally, a different person to each of us.” 

In the end, Nora can see Clare for what she has been all along: a master manipulator who lived to make others love and admire her. To do this, Clare had to act many parts, letting people see what she wanted them to see of her. Throughout Clare’s entire life, acting came as second nature. Although Clare’s machinations have finally caught up with her, Nora wonders if a jury will actually convict someone so beautiful and convincing.