The Book of Two Ways

“There are some feelings that the English language just doesn’t fully capture. An emotion like grief spills over the confines of those five letters. The word joy feels too compact, stunted, for what it evokes. How can you even put into words the confession that you made a mistake, that you want to turn back time and try again? How do you say it without hurting the people who have been sitting across from you at the breakfast table for fifteen years, who know your Starbucks order and which side of the bed to leave you at a hotel?”

Dawn is faced with a difficult decision. Although she loves Wyatt Armstrong, she does not want to hurt Brian or negate the years they have spent together. Picoult frequently ruminates on The Power of Words as well as their limitations, a recurring theme in the novel. Here she highlights language’s inadequacy in the face of complex emotions, and the difficulty of talking about relationships with deep history.

“I actively shove away the memories that rise, and force myself to only see forward. What if it’s that easy to start fresh?”

After an argument with Brian Edelstein, Dawn leaves; she is nearly at the airport when Meret calls her home. She has been thinking about her past, but now decides to think only of the present and her life with Brian. Later, she will discover that denying her past is not the right way to live her life, a key message of the novel.

“‘The reason we don’t see zombie cats or electrons spinning both ways at the same time is because the minute we look at them, we become part of that mathematical equation and we ourselves get split into multiple timelines, where different versions of us see different, concrete outcomes.’ ‘Like a parallel universe,’ I said.”

Brian, Dawn’s husband, is a physicist, and references to his work on parallel universes is woven throughout the text. These references help support Picoult’s use of sliding door narrative conventions in the text. They also provide Dawn with food for thought as she reconsiders her life, and the path she did not take.

“I wonder what would have happened if our roles had been reversed: if I had stayed, and he had gotten the call that changed the rest of his life.”

Dawn imagines a past in which she had stayed in Egypt, and Wyatt had left. On the surface, this quote seems to be about how her life would have been different if she had stayed. However, it is also about how Wyatt, as a man, might have responded differently to the situation. Although not a major theme of the book, Picoult does, in a subtle way, probe the role that gender expectations played in Dawn’s decisions.

“Now is the moment of reckoning; now is when I need to tell Wyatt why I am here. But it feels like the truth is at the top of a mountain, and I am standing at the bottom.”

Dawn has arrived in Egypt and reconnected with Wyatt. Upon first reading this, one may assume that she is there to tell him that she made a mistake by leaving him 15 years ago. Later, however, this moment will read differently; she is contemplating the difficulty of telling Wyatt that he is Meret’s father. Picoult uses a simile, where something is compared to something else using “like” or “as.” Here, Dawn feels “like the truth is at the top of a mountain,” one that she has to climb to from “the bottom.”

“I know it feels crass to talk about death in such mercenary terms, but that’s the very problem with death in the first place. We don’t know how to talk about it. We use euphemisms and discuss pearly gates and angels while glossing over the fact that we have to die to get there. We treat it like a mystery, when in fact, it’s the one experience all of us are guaranteed to share.”

As a death doula, Dawn has to charge clients, yet, as she says, it seems mercenary to think of money in the face of death. Picoult illustrates the many ways in which we avoid facing death, and explores the effects of that avoidance. According to Dawn, by avoiding death and “glossing over” it, the practical aspects of dying feel unapproachable.

“I slipped a newly minted penny in each shoe. I slept with a knife under my mattress, to keep away evil spirits. I went into labor early, but all my superstitious behavior paid off.”

Dawn’s mother had a bevy of superstitions that she passed on to her daughter. These superstitions are a motif that runs throughout the book. Most of the time, Dawn was gently disdainful, but when pregnant, she used every one she could remember. Picoult shows how, when threatened or overwhelmed, humans will grasp onto magical thinking to retain the feeling of control.

“I felt a prickle of fear, the sixth sense you have when you know your life is about to be cleaved into before and after.”

Although their relationship began with competition, Dawn and Wyatt have slowly come to like and respect each other. However, it is not until this scene, where they play a game of Truth or Dare, that competition shifts to attraction. The above quote comes just before Wyatt kisses Dawn for the first time, forever changing their relationship and proving Dawn’s intuition right.

“I grew up knowing that love came at a price.”

Dawn’s mother told her the tragic tale of doomed lovers Tristan and Iseult when she was young, and as a result, she has grown up with the idea that love requires sacrifice. In her own life, she will see this reinforced through her relationships with both Brian and Wyatt. One of the main struggles at the end of the book, for all of the characters, is to figure out how to maintain relationships without sacrificing anything.

“Win is figuring out how to die; I am figuring out how to live.”

Dawn’s relationship with Win develops into true friendship during their time together. Dawn refers to life and death as “flip sides of the same coin,” and here, she and Win represent these two sides. Win’s journey teaches Dawn some valuable truths that she will use to make decisions in her own life.

“Did you ever wonder who you would have been, if you hadn’t become who you are?”

Win asks this of Dawn. Dawn tries to brush it off, but Win will not let her. This idea is integral to the novel, as Dawn grapples with this very question in her relationships with Brian and Wyatt. As their friendship progresses, Win becomes the person in Dawn’s life who forces her to confront her past life as something serious, rather than something to be dismissed.

“Whenever I’ve thought about my life, it has been before and after, scored on different fault lines: Egypt. My mother’s death. Meret. It’s like there is one Dawn who inhabited the space on one side of the division, and a different Dawn who inhabits the space on the other, and it’s hard for me to see how one evolved from the other. I wonder if this is a new fault line. I wonder if you can erase an old one, by going back to the spot where everything changed.”

With her mother’s illness and death, Dawn’s life was split into two parts: her life as an Egyptologist with Wyatt, and her life as a death doula with Brian. This split is echoed in the way Picoult splits the narrative, showing Dawn’s two paths side by side. The last sentence, in which Dawn raises the idea of returning to the moment of the split, is the underlying idea that will fuel her trip to Egypt.

“I realize with a little shock that this snapshot of Djehutynakht is no different from the clients I have now, who want to make sure they’re ready for what comes next, but also want to remember who they have been.”

As a death doula, Dawn has a new perspective of the tomb she is working on when she returns to Egypt. She sees the humanity of the tombs’ owners in a different way, and finds a connection between her current life as a death doula and her past life as an Egyptologist. In this quote, Picoult emphasizes the importance of both past and future when coming to terms with one’s life.

“So this is what it feels like, a reckoning. When you have to push at the scar you try to keep hidden under scarves and coats and layers, and in doing so, you remember exactly what it felt like at the moment of injury. I feel gently along the fissure, the crack that separated my life from what I thought it would be to what it would become. What if, what if, what if.”

Wyatt confronts Dawn about her disappearance. When she tries to evade, he pushes back, focusing on why she never returned. He is forcing Dawn to confront the truth as well—although she had her reasons, she did not examine her decision too closely over the years. When Wyatt asks her, she is forced to confront the truth about her choices, and the painful decision that she buried beneath her new life. Picoult uses a metaphor, where something is compared to something else without using “like” or “as.” In this case, the past is compared to a scar that Dawn tries to hide beneath figurative layers.

“What would I write my mother now, if she could read it? Why didn’t you tell me earlier that you were sick? Why did you leave me? How am I supposed to be a mother when I can’t turn to you for advice? How am I supposed to understand marriage, when you never married my father?”

Dawn remembers that ancient Egyptians wrote letters to the dead and left them in the tomb. She wonders what she would write in a letter to her mother. It would be filled with questions, mostly concerning things that her mother had kept secret from her, most notably, that she and Dawn’s father were never married. Dawn also makes a reference to her struggles as a parent, a theme throughout the novel. The train of questions reflects Dawn’s rising emotion and sense of urgency.

“There are times I wonder if my whole marriage has been me cheating on Thane. If that was the life I was supposed to have.”

Dawn asks Win if she feels like she is cheating on Felix by trying to find Thane, and this is Win’s response. Dawn understands this feeling that Win has, and it forces her to reexamine her own feelings about Wyatt and her relationship with Brian. Picoult uses Win’s journey to parallel Dawn’s own, and to offer her another perspective on her choices.

“It’s pretty simple, Dawn: who do you want with you, when your time runs out?”

Dawn’s conversation with Alberto is thoughtful and illuminating. He boils her choices down to this simple question, one that she understands intimately through her experience as a death doula. This conversation forces Dawn to see the deep connection between her and Wyatt, and to think about their relationship in a larger context.

“‘How many times have I heard Brian talk about alternative universes?’ I pick at a thread on the bottom of a coat hanging behind me. ‘It’s like I’ve opened Pandora’s box…inside my mind. I can’t unsee it.’ ‘Unsee what?’ ‘What my life might have been.’”

Dawn is opening up to Kieran about the dilemma that she is facing. She has looked up Wyatt online, and now cannot shake the idea that she is living the wrong life. Picoult uses her reference to Brian’s work on parallel universes to reinforce her use of sliding door conventions in the novel.

“I meet his gaze, and finally say what I came all this way to say. ‘That’s why I named our daughter after her.’”

Dawn finally confesses to Wyatt why she has come to Egypt to seek him out—to tell him that he has a daughter. This is also the point in the novel where it becomes evident that Dawn’s time in Egypt, in the story’s chronology, is actually happening after the chapters in Boston, rather than concurrently. The fact that the novel is not a sliding door narrative becomes clear at this point in the text.

“That’s when I can see it: a way out. A next life.”

Dawn and Wyatt have found each other in the aftermath of the plane crash. In Dawn’s mind, the metaphor of the Book of Two Ways becomes a way for her to understand the crash. She has successfully traveled the path to the Netherworld—although she is not dead, she has reached the next stage of her life. Picoult emphasizes this idea by naming the following chapter “After.”

“I don’t know how to explain the reason Brian went home was not about how little he cares for me, but how much. I wonder, had the roles been reversed, if Wyatt would have given me the space to make a choice.”

Dawn makes her love and respect for Brian clear throughout the novel, even as she notes the vast difference between him and Wyatt. Picoult does not paint a binary between the men, where one is good and the other bad; instead, they are complex, with good and bad qualities. Dawn understands that Brian is showing his love by giving her space, which Wyatt cannot see. She knows Wyatt, too, and that, given the same situation, he would not have been able to leave.

“I feel my eyes sting. With one photograph, Wyatt has not only given Meret a sense of history, he’s also absolved me.”

Wyatt has shown Meret and Dawn a picture of himself as a child. His body type strongly reflects Meret’s own. Meret, who struggles with her self-image, is relieved to find herself reflected in Wyatt. Part of the reason she has struggled is because neither Dawn nor Brian’s bodies reflect her own. After seeing the photo, she feels an immediate connection to Wyatt.

“In front of me is an inferno. Behind me is an angry ocean.”

Dawn has a nightmare about the plane crash, in which her experience has changed to reflect the Book of Two Ways. These lines also reflect her metaphoric journey; she has traveled through the pain to move from one path, Water/Boston, to another, Land/Egypt. This shift is reflected by the angry ocean behind her, representing Boston, now in her past.