Little Fires Everywhere

“Every house on Winslow Road held two families, but outside appeared to hold only one. They had been designed that way on purpose. It allowed residents to avoid the stigma of living in a duplex house—of renting, instead of owning—and allowed the city planners to preserve the appearance of the street, as everyone knew neighborhoods with rentals were less desirable.” 

The house that Mrs. Richardson rents out to a moving cast of people is on Winslow Road. In contrast to her large family house, the houses on Winslow Road are duplexes that are not owned by the inhabitants but are rental properties. This distinction between owning a home and renting one is a class marker that distinguishes the more affluent people of Shaker Heights from those less fortunate. In an effort to erase class difference in the town, the design of these duplexes to mirrors single-family homes. This is suggestive of the lengths that the town will take to preserve a sense of upper-middle-class normalcy.

“In fact, the city’s motto was—literally, as Lexie would have said—‘Most communities just happen; the best are planned’; the underlying philosophy being that everything could—and should—be planned out, and that by doing so you could avoid the unseemly, the unpleasant, and the disastrous.” 

The description of Shaker Heights’s history as a planned city suggests that its reliance on rules and structure is a means of protecting against social disorder. However, the orderliness of the city only masks the disorder that lies underneath. As the novel progresses, racial and class differences that the ordered city tries to ignore come to surface and emerge as tensions that the town cannot ignore.

“Mrs. Richardson looked at the house as a form of charity. She kept the rent low—real estate in Cleveland was cheap, but apartments in good neighborhoods like Shaker could be pricey—and she rented only to people she felt were deserving but who had, for one reason or another, not quite gotten a fair shot in life. It pleased her to make up the difference.” 

This passage points to Mrs. Richardson’s ulterior motive behind her charitable demeanor. While they may appear as altruism, her actions are motivated by her desire to administer control over the morals and values of the town. She gets to decide who is deserving or not.

“Perfection: that was the goal, and perhaps the Shakers had lived it so strongly it had seeped into the soil itself, feeding those who grew up there with a propensity to overachieve and a deep intolerance for flaws.” 

Perfection is the social imperative of Shaker Heights. It is the ideal internalized by its residents, which means that people like Mrs. Richardson are fearful of anything that threatens the pristine order of the town.

“She would be famous someday, Pearl was certain; someday her adored mother would be one of those artists, like de Kooning or Warhol or O’Keeffe, whose name everyone knew. It was why part of her, at least, didn’t mind the life they’d always lived, their thrift-store clothes, their salvaged beds and chairs, the shifting precariousness of it all. One day everyone would see her mother’s brilliance.”

As part of a nomadic mother-daughter duo, Pearl expresses a very mature sense of patience with their transient lifestyle. This is due to her belief in her mother’s gifts as an artist. However, Pearl’s sense of identity outside her mother is lost here. Due to constant movement, she has not had a chance to develop her sense of self until Shaker Heights.

“To have such a deep taproot in a single place, to be immersed in it so thoroughly that it had steeped into every fiber of your being: she couldn’t imagine it.” 

When Pearl steps into the Richardsons’ house for the first time, she sees souvenirs and other furniture items that suggest that they have lived in the house for a long time. This kind of life is different from the one she leads with her mother. As she and her mother have moved around so much, they never had the opportunity to invest in anything that would constitute a more permanent home. To see the Richardsons live such a seemingly stable life is startling to Pearl.

“But the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them. So in the end I’d probably just frustrate us both.”

When Mrs. Richardson requests that Mia take her family’s portrait, Mia politely declines, as her approach to portraiture is less about serving other people’s views and more about representing her own perspective of her subjects. These statements also foreshadow Mia’s parting gifts for the Richardsons, in which she presents them with objects that are portraitures of what Mia perceives of their deepest struggles, hopes, or desires.

“She had been brought up to follow rules, to believe that the proper functioning of the world depended upon her compliance, and follow them—and believe—she did.” 

Mrs. Richardson was raised all her life in Shaker Heights and has thus internalized the rigid order of the town in terms of her values. Her sense of compliance to this order has made her a diligent enforcer of these values toward those around her. It is also why Mia’s refusal to follow the rules feels so offensive to Mrs. Richardson, who believes that compliance is an essential value to her life and upbringing.

“A part of her wanted to study Mia like an anthropologist, to understand why—and how—she did what she did. Another part of her—though she was only vaguely aware of it at the moment—was uneasy, wanted to keep an eye on Mia, as you might keep your eye on a dangerous beast.”

Mrs. Richardson’s curiosity about Mia is matched by her fear and disdain. Mia is the opposite of everything that she was raised to believe in. Whereas Shaker Heights taught Mrs. Richardson to follow order, Mia goes by intuition and lives an unstructured life. It is suggested that Mrs. Richardson harbors envy toward Mia for her ability to make a life wherever she goes yet also despises her for it, as it threatens her stable life, which is all that she knows.

“Outside in the world, volcanoes erupted, governments rose and collapsed and bartered for hostages, rockets exploded, walls fell. But in Shaker Heights, things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance.” 

The description of Shaker Heights as “peaceful” suggests that its harmony comes from ignorance of the violence that exists around the town. However, the domestic disturbances that exist in the town can no longer be ignored as the custody trial over Mirabelle/May Ling reveals Shaker Heights’ social stratification.

“A modern woman, she always implied, was capable—nay, required—to have it all.” 

While the image of the modern woman conjures a sense of empowerment, Mrs. Richardson has a more compulsory interpretation. If empowerment is based upon choice, then Mrs. Richardson’s interpretation removes freedom of options from the equation. She makes the idea of having everything a necessity, which reconfigures empowerment as a constraint.

“She had learned, with Izzy’s birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course.” 

As Mrs. Richardson relies on a certain compulsion toward order in her life, Izzy’s traumatic birth introduces chaos and unpredictability that she harbors against her daughter as she grows up. Prior to Izzy, Mrs. Richardson was able to give birth easily and without negative consequence to her health. With Izzy, many health issues ensued, which means that Mrs. Richardson will always associate Izzy with disarray and other values contrary to how she prefers to conduct her life.

“In all her years of itinerant living, Mia had developed one rule: Don’t get attached. To any place, to any apartment, to anything. To anyone.” 

Prior to Shaker Heights, Mia and Pearl always left town after a project had been completed. Since Pearl is a teenager who appears to be making friends in Shaker Heights, Mia entertains the idea of staying more permanently so that her daughter can experience a typical adolescence. It is revealed later in the novel that Mia’s transiency is due to the circumstances of Pearl’s birth and her trying to avoid being found by the Ryans.

“She would never admit even to herself that it hadn’t been about the baby at all: it had been some complicated thing about Mia herself, the dark discomfort this woman stirred up that Mrs. Richardson would have preferred to have kept in its box.” 

Mrs. Richardson feels betrayed when she realizes that Mia revealed to Bebe that her baby is with the McCulloughs. It becomes an occasion for her to enact a personal vendetta that precedes the custody trial; Mrs. Richardson resents Mia because her way of life poses a threat to Mrs. Richardson’s orderly existence. Mia’s intervention in the custody trial is an example of the chaos that she introduces into what Mrs. Richardson believes is an otherwise calm life in Shaker Heights.

“Didn’t you have the right to know where something came from, so that you knew what malfunction might be in store? Didn’t she—as this woman’s employer, as well as her landlady—have a right to know the same?” 

Mrs. Richardson tries to justify why she goes to such lengths to uncover Mia’s past. By describing Mia’s nontraditional approach to life as a “malfunction,” Mrs. Richardson frames her looking into her tenant’s past as a way of rectifying a problem. She reasons that as Mia’s landlady, she deserves to know about her tenant’s past but exceeds the legal bounds of her position to acquire information about Mia.

“The McCulloughs were rescuing Mirabelle, their supporters insisted. They were giving an unwanted child a better life. They were heroes, breaking down racism through cross-cultural adoption.” 

Supporters of the McCulloughs possess a “colorblind” view of the adoption process. To them, the McCulloughs are white saviors who are rescuing a child from a poor Chinese mother. By adopting a Chinese baby, they are creating a more racially diverse family model. However, these perceptions of race rely on assumptions about preexisting equal access. According to the opponents, Bebe does not have the same resources as the McCulloughs but can provide culturally specific bonding that white adoptive parents cannot offer.

“Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.”

Throughout the course of the novel, Mrs. Richardson’s conviction to following the rules intensifies such that it feels as if “you might burn the world to the ground” (161) if they are not followed. The irony is that this harsh imposition of rules leads Izzy to set fire to the family house. Mrs. Richardson’s rules are rendered useless in the end, as her worst fears, including the loss of Izzy, come true.

“I can’t believe you’d sell your own child.”

When George and Regina Wright learn that their daughter is a surrogate for a wealthy couple, they are outraged, as they believe that any child a mother carries belongs to her. For Mia to become a surrogate for money is an offense to their sense of the natural order of motherhood. 

“You’ll always be sad about this […] But it doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It’s just something that you have to carry.” 

When Lexie gets an abortion, she asks Mia if she has made the right choice. Mia’s gentle reminder that such an event in her life will stay with her is echoed in her parting gift for Lexie later in the novel. To represent what Lexie will “have to carry,” Mia makes her a paper net using her abortion clinic discharge slip and a stone inside it.

“For her it was simple: Bebe Chow had been a poor mother; Linda McCullough had been a good one. One had followed the rules, and one had not.” 

Mrs. Richardson attempts to reduce the Mirabelle/May Ling custody trial into bare facts. For her, Bebe is a bad mother, and Linda McCullough is a good one. She tries to represent this as an unbiased view that is based on the metric of social rules being followed. However, her assessment does not account for other contingencies such as unequal access. While Linda may seem like the one who can better provide, it is because she has immediate access to monetary resources to become a financially stable parent. Bebe does not have that immediately, but with support she can.

“She could not pretend that nothing had happened. Mia had opened a door in her that could not be shut again.” 

Outraged by her family’s poor treatment of Mia and Pearl, Izzy refuses to allow their departure to mark a return to normalcy to the household. Building a relationship with Mia has transformed Izzy, as it is the first time she has been truly seen in her life. She is moved to do something drastic to remind her family of Mia’s impact.

“‘Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.’” 

Izzy is reminded of Mia’s words, which signal a metaphorical new beginning by fire. She literalizes Mia’s words by setting her family house on fire with the same level of orchestration and deliberateness that goes into Mia’s art making. In this way, she hopes that the family’s desire to return to normalcy will be stunted and that they can be forced to recognize the flaws within them. This is to teach them that the orderly way will doom them in the end.

“The message was clear: Mia would not try to sell them; she would not share them or hold them for some future leverage. These are yours, the stack seemed to say, these are you. Do what you will with them.”

Mia’s parting gifts for the Richardsons consist of deeply personal objects that reveal something intimate about each member of the family. She includes the photograph negatives accompanying each object as a way of demonstrating that she has no intention of remaking those images for financial profit or future blackmail. Despite the Richardsons’ judgment and unkindness toward Mia and Pearl, this offering reveals Mia’s careful insight into their lives and her show of grace toward them.