The House We Grew Up In

These chapters explore the impact of Rhys’s death and Lorelei’s hoarding, which is still referred to as her “mess” or “stuff,” although Meg believes she is unwell and needs to see a therapist. Building on the symbol of settings, Meg’s house in North London is the antithesis of her mother’s place; while overly tidy, it also lacks warmth and vitality. Both settings demonstrate these mothers’ shortcomings, with Meg’s family feeling controlled by her. Likewise, these settings represent the mothers’ fears; Meg struggles as a mother and tries to manage her life’s chaos through her environment.

Beth is starting to follow in her mother’s footsteps because she doesn’t throw things away or organize them. Like Lorelei, Beth clings to objects to deal with her arrested development; with every time skip, Beth notes that she still lives at home despite her age. There is tension in the book between chaos and order as used by Lorelei and Meg to deal with their anxieties. Beth feels caught between both worlds. On the one hand, she is pleased when she sees Molly’s arm dangling through the bars of her cot, subverting “the lines of Meg’s strictly ordered world” (109). She imagines Bill can’t be happy living in such a sterile environment, and their affair makes her life “messy” and adds excitement. On the other hand, Beth longs for a life like her sister’s, who is ambitious, driven, and always looks “shower-fresh, salon-fresh, boutique-fresh” (126). This affair builds suspense, creating another secret that will eventually be exposed. Here, Jewell links the past timeline with Beth and Meg’s present-day rift, using subtext to hint that this betrayal is the reason the sisters don’t speak anymore.

Beth’s arrested development is traced to the moment her brother died, as she felt a duty to stay at home to look after her mother. Highlighting the theme of Escape Versus Coming Together, she feels “much safer bobbing about in the same patterns and the same places with the same people” (114). Like a child, she finds it difficult to imagine the future. She is becoming a mirror for Lorelei, who fills “her head with the things closest to her, the here and now, not the over there and then” (119). Jewell’s intertwining timelines foreshadow a dark future for Beth through Lorelei’s decline and death; if she replicates Lorelei’s life, she’ll also become imprisoned by her past. At the same time, Beth shows the same desire to escape as her siblings; when Bill pays attention to her, she “could feel a strange subtle shift inside herself […] [j]ust enough to open her mind to the possibility of more. More life, more love, more attention” (127). Rory found the strength to escape from his family and move abroad when he met Kayleigh, and Beth is now seeing the possibility of her life opening up as well, albeit at her sister’s expense. While Beth is unhappy being stuck, Meg and Rory still feel trapped in their new circumstances, hinting that escape alone is not enough to substantially change one’s life.

For now, Beth is stuck reliving the same Easter Sunday traditions. Lorelei is still organizing an egg hunt, this time for Vicky’s children. Like Beth, Maddy’s favorites are the pink ones, and Beth remembers “herself at Maddy’s age, full of unquestioning love for her family, for the world around her, for pink eggs and pink raincoats and pink icing” (129). This idyllic childhood imagery is juxtaposed with descriptions of Rhys’s body, highlighting how this event shattered the children’s innocence. Colin swears for the first time in front of them, and all of the children, including Vicky’s, see Rhys’s body. The gradual revelation of details about this day exposes the trauma that lives in all of them.

The younger generation shows an interest in their relatives, in contrast to the siblings who flee the family home as soon as they can. Molly wants to meet her Uncle Rory, whom she only saw as a baby. Similarly, Tia is looking forward to knowing more about her cousins. Family roots run deep, and Jewell implies that through the younger generation, the wounds of the past will heal. When very young, Molly compares her grandmother’s messy house with her mother’s excessively tidy place. Molly prefers her mother’s neatness but decides that when she grows up, she will keep things tidy but won’t always throw things away. Even as a child, she realizes that there can be a happy medium between the two extremes. This is also demonstrated through her happy relationship with Meg, a contrast to Lorelei’s distant and fraught relationships with her children.

Vicky’s relationship with Lorelei adds a new dynamic to the family unit. Vicky has started to clear the house by secretly taking a couple of bags to the charity shop, indicating a will to heal past trauma but fear of openly changing things. The chapters set in 2011 show the futility of this effort, indicating that like escape, this method is insufficient without addressing underlying issues. The Birds’ tragedy propelled Vicky into the middle of the family, and Lorelei’s calm response lulled Vicky into thinking Lorelei had a handle on things. While the children seek change through escape, Vicky’s enabling adoration of Lorelei further roots her in the house, a further example of the theme of Escape Versus Coming Together.

The family has gathered again for Easter, but it is as if Lorelei is an actor on a stage:

The oven was heating up, the lamb was on the counter draped over with stems of rosemary from the garden, the pastel-coloured eggs were in a bowl ready to be distributed, the sun was fighting its way through some dense black cloud (150).

The symbolism of the dark clouds contrasts with the archetypal Easter preparations, highlighting the tensions simmering under the surface. While Lorelei maintains her rituals to grasp at stability, things have changed: Colin has withdrawn from family life, Pandora lives far away, and Vicky sees trouble between Kayleigh, who wants to stay in Spain, and Rory, who feels the seductive lure of home. Kayleigh distances herself from her own pregnancy by disparaging babies, and this angers Meg, who is coping with her trauma by trying to create her own perfect family. Vicky unintentionally takes on Lorelei’s role by announcing the egg hunt, and she quickly realizes her mistake: “It was always such a blasted balancing act with Lorrie, between caring for her, picking up the slack, and disempowering her, and she was always always getting it wrong” (154). This is the first suggestion of Vicky being dissatisfied with her relationship. This moment also characterizes Lorelei more honestly, backing up Colin’s earlier assertions that she is unhappy beneath her sparkling surface.

The Bird family is characterized by secrets, lies, and a lack of cohesion. In these chapters, the big secret is Beth and Bill’s affair, though Beth alludes to a family-wide problem; when Bill suggests that Rory is different from the rest of the family, Beth responds “We’re all different to the rest of us. We’re like a badly planned dinner party” (156). This directly contradicts her mother’s attempts to create the perfect stage set. Once again, as an outsider, Kayleigh can see the truth, in line with the theme of Clarity Gained from Different Viewpoints. She gives a veiled warning to Beth to end her relationship with Bill, foreshadowing how the affair won’t give Beth the escape or validation that she seeks. She ignores this advice, though, and focuses on how she feels trapped: “There were too many people in this house, too many pairs of ears” (161).