49 pages • 1 hour read
Jean Hanff KorelitzThe Sequel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A 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
The Ethics of Storytelling
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains explicit descriptions of sexual violence, domestic abuse, suicide, and murder (including the violent death of a child).
The novel asks questions about who has the right to tell the individual’s story via Anna Williams-Bonner’s fraught relationship with fiction and storytelling. Throughout the novel, Anna is desperate for control of her own story and feels exploited when she discovers that both her husband Jake Bonner and her brother Evan Parker have co-opted her coming-of-age story for their own authorial gain. She goes so far as to kill Jake and Evan in order to reclaim authority over her story. Her acts of violence illustrate the lengths the individual might go to in order to protect her story and identity.
When Anna writes The Afterword, she is attempting to claim her story in fiction and to seize control of her own narrative. As a result, she’s lauded for “turn[ing] her heartbreak into art” and “set[ting] her own path, unafraid” for herself (6). She has “never aspired to write so much as a Hallmark card” before penning The Afterword (5), but publishing this novel about her husband’s death by suicide grants Anna a sense of authority over the life and identity she has curated for herself. Her “very public fiction-inspiring personal tragedy—the spouse of a suicidal writer!—” produces a compelling narrative that not only sells in the publishing world, but that satisfies the public’s voyeuristic inclinations (7). Through The Afterword, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel thus suggests that storytelling is a powerful tool and can be used in both positive and negative ways. Penning a story about another individual, living or dead, is a way to seize control of their personhood and legacy. Anna’s narrative in The Afterword isn’t autobiographical like she says, but it does allow her to control how the public sees her and what they believe about her husband.
Furthermore, Jake’s and Evan’s decisions to use Anna’s story in their own writing capture the ways in which storytelling might disempower its subject and distort her sense of truth and reality. Indeed, in Jake’s and Evan’s novelistic iterations of Anna’s life story, Anna is represented as either a villain or a seductress. In Evan’s manuscript in particular, he is using storytelling to expose his sister for her crimes and to control his version of events. The novel uses each novelistic iteration in The Sequel narrative to capture the possible risks and dangers of storytelling and the complex ethical issues that writing might inspire.
The Intersection of the Past and Present
Anna’s obsessive desire to erase all evidence of her past acts as the narrative soil for the novel’s explorations concerning the intersection of the past and present. Ever since leaving West Rutland, Vermont, Anna has sought to destroy her ties to her past in the yellow, ancestral house. Her decisions to kill Evan and Rose Parker are both symptoms of her longing for freedom and her desperation to live a life uncontrolled by the trauma she experienced in her childhood and adolescence. However, the harder she tries to destroy her past, the more it festers and threatens to upset her security in the present. The emergences of Anna’s past throughout the novel capture the ways in which the individual can never fully eradicate her past from her life in the present. Furthermore, the novel implies, the individual’s past identity will always influence who she becomes in the future.
The excerpts of Evan’s manuscript that Anna encounters throughout the novel are symbolic representations of the past. The same is true of the sticky note Anna finds in the book on her book tour, which unleashes Anna’s past in her present life and threatens to expose her crimes and her fraudulent persona:
[The note is] the first indication since Jake’s death that someone had not forgotten the name Evan Parker, and that this same someone was aware of Evan’s connection to Jacob Finch Bonner, her late husband and the obvious ‘inspiration’ for the book that Post-it note had been affixed to (65).
Anna is unnerved by the note because it creates a direct connection between her present life as Anna Williams-Bonner and her past life as Dianna Parker. As a result, the note sets off a proverbial chain reaction. Throughout the subsequent chapters, more reminders of Anna’s past surface in her present in the form of Evan’s manuscript. When she has these pages in hand, Anna is powerless to erase who she was, what she lived through, and what she did to escape Vermont. The novel uses the manuscript and note to illustrate the ways in which the individual’s past is always embedded in her present no matter how hard she tries to deny or bury it.
Anna’s seemingly hyperbolic responses to discovering Evan’s manuscript excerpts capture the ways in which the past might psychologically and emotionally dictate the individual’s life for years to come. Indeed, all of Anna’s crimes and manipulations in the present are the result of her childhood trauma and her desire to separate herself from these harrowing events. However, the novel suggests that because Anna has trouble acknowledging and confronting her fraught past, she can’t heal from it. It will continue to surface and unnerve her if she doesn’t claim her real history.
The Tension Between Truth and Fiction
Anna’s dual lives and identities fuel the novel’s explorations concerning the interconnection and disparities between truth and fiction. Anna has worked hard to divide her life into two separate circles and eras. In the narrative present, Anna has hidden herself behind her brief marriage to Jake Bonner and her life as Jake’s widow and as a debut novelist. In the past, Anna’s life was defined by “the yellow house” and her fraught relationships with her parents, brother, and daughter (66). She has “gotten rid of” the only “two people [who] ever occupied the tiny overlap between [these] circles” in order to fully inhabit her new fabricated life and identity (66). Indeed, Anna Williams-Bonner is a fictional persona: an identity Anna created and adopted in order to deny the truth of her past. The novel uses Anna’s desperation to embrace this fictionalized version of her life and herself in order to explore the ways in which invention and storytelling are innate to the human experience.
In particular, the novel is using Anna’s life as Jake’s wife and widow to convey the ways in which identity itself is a fictional construct. The novel implies that all individuals are socially and culturally compelled to design a sense of self and to abide by its curated parameters. Because reminders of Anna’s past life as Dianna in Vermont invade her life as Anna in New York, she tries to destroy all evidence of Dianna’s existence. In doing so, she is attempting to overwrite the truth of her past and original identity. By metaphorically killing off her past self, Anna gains an illusory sense of control over truth and reality. She is indeed writing fiction with her own life.
The novel uses these facets of Anna’s story to capture the ways in which telling oneself a story about herself begets a new truth, however false or manipulated it may be. Indeed at the novel’s end, Anna realizes “that she’[s] been making fiction far longer than she’[s] been writing it, and fiction ha[s] taken her far from where [she] beg[a]n” (286). Fiction has indeed “filled her life with people who [know] her worth as fully—though perhaps not as intimately—as she [does], herself” (286). She has created an entirely new realm of reality and thus curated a new life, social sphere, and sense of self-worth around it. Indeed, inventing her life and persona as Anna is Anna’s primary fictional accomplishment. The novel thus argues that writing fiction is a way to rewrite reality and to construct new truths.
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