That's Not My Name

“Sure enough, it’s me. Same stranger from my reflection […] though my face looks different when it’s not so bruised and swollen.”

Madison’s thoughts about the photo of Mary characterize her as willing to believe the best of others—she attributes the differences between her appearance and Mary’s to her recent injuries, rather than becoming suspicious of Wayne. This foreshadows the trouble she will have putting together later clues that Wayne is deceiving her and supports the text’s thematic claims about Memory’s Role in Identity and The Deceptive Nature of Appearances.

“Life really goes to shit when everyone thinks you killed your girlfriend.”

Drew’s first words in the novel characterize him as having a sardonic sense of humor and a blunt, direct tone that does not spare either his audience or himself. He is complaining both about the frustration of trying to use the library copier and his situation more generally, making a darkly humorous claim that the technological hiccup with the printer is yet another example of how suspicions about his role in Lola’s disappearance have turned everyone—and everything—against him. This helps develop the text’s themes of The Dangers of Isolation and The Deceptive Nature of Appearances.

“The darkness pushes back to the tree line and hovers there like a living thing.”

When the cabin’s outside light goes on, Madison has the sense that the darkness of the mountain reacts like a living thing, retreating backward from the light. This personification of the darkness, along with diction like “hovers,” conveys a sense of the darkness as deliberately menacing, reinforcing the text’s messages about The Dangers of Isolation.

“I stare at the hives on my arm. ‘Do I need an EpiPen?’

He looks surprised. ‘Um, no. Not that I remember.’”

At this moment, Madison’s situation becomes more clearly dire. Her memory loss is actually endangering her life, now, as she cannot even remember a serious food allergy. Her thoughts are too chaotic in the middle of this frightening allergic episode for her to spot how obviously suspicious it is that Wayne, who claims to be the doting father who has raised her on his own since his wife’s death many years ago, has little idea what her medical needs might be. This contributes to the tension around Madison’s safety and foreshadows that she is not actually Mary Boone.

“It feels like walking with a ghost.”

Drew’s thoughts as he remembers walking arm-in-arm with Lola are a reminder of how much he is suffering and how much he really did love Lola: This image conveys how intertwined he still is with Lola, even in her absence, and that she is “with” him, living or dead. This is one of the few moments when he admits the possibility of her death. Deep down, despite his conscious denials, something in him knows that Lola is no longer alive; hints like this make Megan Lally’s construction of the story still “fair play,” in genre terms, because she is providing foreshadowing of Lola’s actual fate alongside the misdirection that suggests Lola and “Mary” are the same person.

“I get a closer look at his insanely clean vehicle today. The carpet has those zigzag streaks like it was recently vacuumed, and there are fresh black covers on the seats that smell brand new.”

Madison’s description of Wayne’s vehicle is innocuous on its own, but by this point in the story the reader is already aware of several clues that point to Wayne not being Madison’s father, making his meticulous cleaning of the van suspect. Madison’s diction is unintentionally ironic—she describes the van as “insanely” clean. She intends this as a lighthearted quip, but by the end of the story, Wayne’s mental health will be seriously in doubt. In combination with the popular tropes of serial killers driving vans and detailing them carefully to hide evidence of their crimes, this imagery creates an ominous tone.

“You can’t remember. You don’t know the rules. There’s clothing I’m not allowed to wear? Along with the ‘clean’ books I read?”

Madison is taken aback by Wayne’s irritation over her V-neck T-shirt. She puts it together with other details from the past days, beginning to assemble a picture of Wayne as controlling in a way that feels unfamiliar and unsettling. Before, each detail just seemed surprising to her, because she believed she was unable to remember simple facts about her own personality and preferences. Now, her surprise is turning to skepticism, and she begins to pay closer attention to the discrepancies between Wayne’s account of her life and her own internal sense of her identity.

“My parents don’t deserve a son as careless as me.”

Throughout the story, there is a repeated motif related to the relationships between parents and their children. Drew’s fathers offer the story’s healthiest models of parenting. After Drew’s dad shows his unwavering support for Drew by making sure Drew has ink to print his missing person fliers, Drew recognizes how much effort his parents put into meeting his needs and demonstrating their complete acceptance of him. Ironically, this only increases his feelings of guilt, because after breaking up with Lola and inadvertently contributing to her disappearance, he feels unworthy of such love.

“‘They’ll never turn that off,’ Autumn says from the backseat. ‘The bulb will burn out, and they’ll replace it again and again until they’re a hundred years old.’”

The lightbulb that Lola’s parents leave on in her bedroom is a poignant symbol of the way that Lola continues to haunt the people she loved. Autumn’s hyperbole emphasizes the extremity of her parents’ grief and the feeling that the loss of someone like Lola is impossible to get over.

“Holy shit. Was that a memory of my mom?”

The moment when Madison remembers her mother for the first time has tremendous emotional significance for her, reinforcing the novel’s motif of parents and children. It also shows Memory’s Role in Identity: Although Madison has had brief flashes of memory twice before, this is the memory with enough emotional resonance to stick with her and begin crumbling her belief in the “Mary Boone” identity Wayne is trying to construct for her.

“Both of us seem to have the same amount of information about my allergies. Which is decidedly nothing.”

The tone of Madison’s thoughts about Wayne grows more critical following her second allergy attack. As she contemplates her salad and finds that she is too afraid to eat anything, she is—at least for the moment—done making excuses for Wayne and giving him the benefit of the doubt. Even a person as generous-minded as Madison cannot ignore how irresponsible it is, if Wayne is genuinely her father, for him to know next to nothing about her allergies.

“‘I’m doing what anyone would for someone they care about.’

‘Maybe. But not everyone cares this much.’”

Drew believes that anyone missing a loved one would go to the lengths he has gone to in order to find Lola, but Max points out that Drew’s efforts are actually extraordinary. This helps to characterize Drew as someone who loves deeply and whose integrity compels him to live up to his morals even when it means putting himself at risk. He does not see this as a special quality, however, indicating that he is also a humble person whose actions are not designed to impress others.

“Enough with the dramatics, Drew. We’re not looking for some Ted Bundy wannabe. There’s no bogeyman serial killer hanging out by the river. Things like that don’t happen around here.”

Sheriff Roane’s snide tone makes it clear that Drew cannot expect any help from Roane in following the tip that Lola is in Waybrooke. Roane’s remarks are unintentionally ironic, since it will later become clear that they are, in fact, looking for a serial killer operating in their area. He believes that their beautiful, rural area does not contain this kind of evil, showing how prone he is to fall for The Deceptive Nature of Appearances. This dialogue characterizes Roane as narrow-minded and stubborn in a way that prevents him from doing his job effectively.

“I see my whole life with her, blurry at the edges as it connects with other people and places I can’t quite reach yet, but she is clear as day.”

The text’s motif related to parents and children, and the centrality of this relationship, is clear as Madison begins to remember her life. She recovers memories of her mother first, and even while the rest of her life remains “blurry,” her mother stands clear in her mind, anchoring Madison to her real identity.

“What if we’re headed for another kind of isolation? […] At least here, Officer Bowman knows where to find me. Nobody I remember will know where I am once he takes me home.”

Madison’s panicked thoughts after Wayne announces that they are leaving for McMinnville center on The Dangers of Isolation. Even though McMinnville is a much larger town than Alton, the possibility that Wayne is about to take her to somewhere where she remembers no one is terrifying to her; if she cannot remember anyone there, the size of the town will not matter to her sense of isolation.

“He beams at me, and for a moment he looks so much like my Papá. A stab of guilt fissures through me.”

Drew’s strong relationship with his parents is clear at this moment. Even though he is excited about the lead he and his friends have found, and he feels close to finding Lola for the first time, he still feels guilty about the worry he is causing his fathers. The figurative language comparing his guilt to a stab wound creating a “fissure” emphasizes how deep this parent-child bond is, supporting the text’s motif of parent-child relationships. That Drew is reminded so forcefully of his father when Max “beams” at him points out how supportive and loving Drew’s parents really are.

“Never let them take you to a secondary location.”

As Madison stands outside of Wayne’s van trying to decide what to do, she thinks of the often-repeated advice about not letting an abductor move you to a new location. This is the first time that she has allowed herself to fully understand the truth of her situation: She is in serious danger, and Wayne is trying to close off her options. This reinforces The Dangers of Isolation and increases the tension of the moment.

“I shut off my phone, knowing with absolute certainty that this is the worst thing I’ve ever done to them. The guilt of that chases me up the highway.”

The personification of guilt as something sentient capable of chasing Drew as he travels north to try to find Lola conveys his desperation to escape this seemingly inescapable feeling. Drew’s close relationship with his fathers has taught him empathy and a sense of responsibility to others. This creates an impossible situation for him: He will feel terrible and guilty if he does not try to save Lola, and he will feel terrible and guilty if he makes his fathers worried by continuing to try to save Lola. This aspect of Drew’s characterization helps to support the novel’s motif of parents and children.

“I stare at his blank fucking face and smash my rock into his temple, driving his whole head to the side.”

After days of indecision and confusion, Madison is finally able to act quickly and decisively at this critical moment. Her diction—“his blank fucking face”—reveals how manipulative his expressions of emotion toward her have been to this point; she finds it much easier to act to save herself now that he has dropped his mask of caring and she can see his real indifference to her.

“This looks like a place where dreams go to die.”

Drew personifies dreams as an animate creature drawn to Alton as a place to give up and die. This figurative language emphasizes the small town’s empty and lifeless appearance and creates a foreboding atmosphere that increases the tension around Madison’s odds of survival. This portrayal of Alton helps support the text’s claims about The Dangers of Isolation.

“This time, I do what I should have done from the start. I tell the truth. The entire truth, even the ugly bits.”

When Drew decides to be completely honest with the officer at the Alton police station, it is a mark of how much more he trusts this department than Roane’s Washington City sheriff department. It also shows that Drew’s experiences have taught him the importance of honesty in high-stakes situations, even when telling the truth hurts.

“Panic crawls through the darkness and covers me like a blanket made of rocks.”

Madison’s personification of panic as a living thing emphasizes its power over her. The diction “crawling” contributes to the creepy, frightening atmosphere of this scene, as does the vivid image in the simile “like a blanket made of rocks.”

“You’re not Lola.”

This short, punchy sentence abruptly collapses the dual possibilities of “Mary’s” true identity into a single possibility. The reader knows for sure now that the young woman is not Lola Scott and that Lola is another of Wayne’s victims, already dead by the time the novel begins. Lally sets up this key moment by having Drew stare at Madison and note all of the similarities between her and Lola before his words puncture this last bit of misdirection and make it clear that the young woman is a complete stranger to him.