51 pages • 1 hour read
Jodi PicoultThe Book of Two Ways
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Living With Death
Dawn, the protagonist of The Book of Two Ways, is a death doula and former Egyptologist. Since the death of her dog when she was a child, Dawn has been interested in death, and her work reflects a continuing exploration of the topic. Picoult addresses death from a variety of angles. She uses Dawn’s personal and professional experience to probe societal attitudes about dying, and to explore what it means to have a good death.
After her mother’s death, Dawn realized that “death is scary and confusing and painful, and facing it alone shouldn’t be the norm” (50). This attitude led to her work as a death doula. Dawn notices how people react when they learn her profession: “Tell someone you work with the dying, and you are suddenly a saint” (202). In contrast, her own attitude toward her profession is much more down-to-earth: “Just because I get close to something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable doesn’t mean I’m special. It just means I am willing to get close to the things that make people uncomfortable” (202).
Picoult uses Dawn’s clear and pragmatic attitude toward death to highlight, by contrast, society’s attitudes toward it. Death is something that we tend to avoid, Dawn says: “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” (129). Avoidance means that we are ill-equipped when death inevitably comes. As Dawn asserts, if we spend our lives avoiding all mention of it, when we are faced with death, our suffering will be greater.
Instead, Dawn argues, one should consider death as a part of life, rather than its opposite. As a death doula who has knowledge of Egyptology, she advocates for death as not only a part of life, but equal to it: “Life and death are heads and tails. You can’t have one without the other” (193). She also raises the idea of life and death as a continuum, rather than two separate states. As she tells Win, “people assume death is all or nothing. [...] But that’s not what it’s like, is it? The echo of you is still here—in your children or grandchildren; in the art you made while living; in the memories other people have of you” (294). This is why Dawn recites the names of past clients every day—the idea being that “as long as someone remembers you, you never really die” (169). Picoult uses Dawn’s attitude and perspective to challenge conventional ideas that death is separate from life.
Dawn is honest about how one cannot know what comes after death, but she does offer ideas on how to have a good death. She advocates for knowledge—to confront, rather than avoid, death’s inevitability. Her work as a death doula has taught her that thinking about and planning for death can help ease the pain and fear of it. Her knowledge of Egyptology reflects the same understanding of knowledge as the key to a good death. Of the Book of Two Ways, she says, “how comforting it would be to have a map to reach the afterlife. Even the Ancient Egyptians recognized that knowledge was the difference between a good death and a bad one” (211).
Dawn also sees having the love and support of others as essential to a good death. As she tells Wyatt: “Everyone knows how to die, [...] but that doesn’t mean you can’t use a little support” (168). After her mother died, Dawn’s feeling that no one should be alone while dying led her to become a death doula, a career that would provide that support. Dawn believes that death should be faced, rather than avoided, and that those who are confronting it should have support and companionship. Picoult uses Dawn’s intimacy with death, and her unconventional perspective, to explore societal attitudes about death and to offer a different path.
Evolving Parenthood
In The Book of Two Ways, Dawn undertakes a major journey, venturing into her past and reconnecting with her passions for Egyptology and Wyatt. An equally important journey is happening in her relationship with her daughter, Meret. As Dawn confronts her past and decides her future, her approach to parenting shifts and she is able to truly connect with Meret in a new way.
In her work, Dawn confronts death with composure, and is “willing to get close to the things that make people uncomfortable” (202). Yet in her relationship with Meret, she is wary, and avoids discussing important things with her. She and Meret clearly love each other, and yet they struggle to connect at the beginning of the novel. In some ways, Dawn looks to Brian for examples of good parenting. Brian offers his daughter unswerving support—“there was Brian, rocking Meret when she had colic. There was Brian, tossing her in the air until she squealed with delight. There was Brian, teaching her how to jump in from the side of a pool” (343). He works on his relationship with Meret in a conscious, deliberate way, and is willing to set aside any feelings he may have toward Dawn and Wyatt so that Meret can accept her changing family. He is a steadfast parent, and Meret’s wellbeing is his top priority, even when it makes things difficult for him. Dawn sees the strength of his choices, and uses him as a model for some aspects of her own parenting style.
As the story continues, Dawn recognizes the need to work on her relationship with her daughter: “It’s funny, you think as a mother that the very act of giving someone life should be enough to bind you to them. But just because you love someone unconditionally doesn’t mean you don’t have to work at it” (138). She recognizes that the parent/child relationship is work, like Brian’s relationship with Meret, which he has carefully built over the years: “He saw the distance between them and he coaxed and beckoned and engaged until she came closer” (139). Later, Dawn will use this same strategy with Meret. She realizes that she “wanted Wyatt to build a relationship with his daughter, but maybe he’s not the only one who needs to do that” (361).
Dawn reaches out to Meret, an evolution that culminates in two pivotal scenes. In the first, Dawn confronts Meret’s tennis coach about perceived bullying, and Meret feels loved and supported. Just after the confrontation, Dawn and Meret finally, for the first time, talk about Meret’s body image issues. Dawn opens up to Meret, confessing her own shame, when she was younger, about being too thin. This is a new level of intimacy for Meret and Dawn. The experience shows Dawn the way to approach her relationship with Meret—with the same straightforward honesty that she uses in her work.
By the end of the novel, Dawn has decided that honesty is the way forward with her daughter: “This is how I want her to remember me: as someone who told her the truth, even when it was a razor. As someone who learned the hard way, so she would not have to” (405). She has decided to use her willingness to confront discomfort for the sake of honesty, which has been so invaluable in her work, as a model for how to navigate parenthood. In the final scenes of the novel, she develops a new closeness with Meret that, at the beginning of the novel, she could not have imagined.
The Power of Words
Words matter, and Dawn knows that. She has learned, as an Egyptologist, as a death doula, and also on a personal level, that language can have an enormous impact. At the same time, however, words often fail to capture the complexity of life. In The Book of Two Ways, Picoult explores both the power of words and their fallibility.
As an Egyptologist, Dawn sees the power that words held for ancient Egyptians, and the resonance of that power over thousands of years. They believed that words are potent enough to evoke change: “Ancient Egyptians believed that words were so powerful that if you spoke them, things might happen you didn’t want to happen” (291). Dawn understands the power of this idea: “There’s such a beautiful simplicity in believing that by speaking a wish, you can make it happen” (319). Her specialty is language—the transcription and translation of the hieroglyphics that covered the walls of Egyptian tombs. The power of words is reflected in these tombs, which are covered in, among other things, instructions necessary for the deceased to reach the Netherworld.
As a death doula, Dawn understands the power of words in a different way. The most notable thing, to Dawn, about the way people talk about death is how they avoid it: “We use euphemisms and discuss pearly gates and angels while glossing over the fact that we have to die to get there” (129). In avoiding a discussion about death, there is an implicit acknowledgment of the power of words, a power that extends to the words we say to each other as well: “One thing I’ve always told caregivers and clients is that last words are lasting words” (298).
The power of someone’s final words could shape another person’s life. Dawn recognizes this when she decides not to deliver Win’s letter to Thane; the letter has the power to destroy his family, as well as Felix. The language of death, as Dawn points out, is also important: “Death doesn’t just happen to us. In fact, there’s no passive voice in the English language for it. It’s an action verb. You have to die” (192). Although word choice may seem like a small thing, it reinforces the idea that dying is active, not something done to us.
Yet in many ways, words are inadequate to represent complex and deeply layered emotions—“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” (32). When Dawn reads Win’s obituary after her death, she reflects: “It is a pale imitation of the friend I knew, but words are like that. They never quite capture what you need them to” (400). Although words are often inadequate to express life’s complexities, they are often full of import that go far beyond their literal meaning. As Dawn says early on in the book: “Any Ancient Egyptian would tell you that words have great power” (104). In The Book of Two Ways, Picoult explores this paradox from a variety of angles, using Dawn’s experiences to highlight the ways in which language has power, and the ways in which it sometimes fails us.
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