Bones & All

“For three hours I lost myself in the story the way I could in my favorite books. I was beautiful and brave, someone destined to love and to survive, to be happy and to remember. Real life held none of those things for me, but in the pleasant darkness of that shabby old theater I forgot it never would.”

While watching Titanic on her 16^th birthday, Maren wishes her life could be more like the lives of the characters in the stories she loves. She doesn’t know how to look forward to anything, given her nature. Because of its lack of monsters, the movie allows her to become a desired hero, something that the fairy tales never give her.

“What was I expecting? Somebody like me could never be the good one.”

Maren is disappointed that she only identifies with monsters in stories. She knows that she—like the witches, ghouls, and trolls—will never have a happy ending. She will never be the protagonist in a story, not even her own. Maren has no hope because she thinks she deserves to be punished. She also thinks about herself in absolutes, frequently using words like “never” and “always.””

“I thought I’d understood how hard it was for my mother. I was sorry and I wished I could be different, but that wasn’t the same as understanding. I didn’t understand when she locked herself in the bathroom, didn’t understand when I saw the empty wine bottles lined up along the kitchen counter, didn’t understand when I heard her crying through the wall. Now I was beginning to.”

Maren watches her mother and grandmother embrace through the window in Edgartown, her mother’s hometown. She suddenly realizes that she can’t empathize with her mother’s struggle. She has no idea what it’s like to be the mother of someone like her. Her mother’s grief forces her to understand. Perhaps Maren didn’t deserve abandonment, but she has to admit that her mother did what she could, only leaving Maren when she felt that she truly couldn’t handle more.

“Whenever you tell yourself, This time it will be different, it’s as good as a promise that it’ll turn out the same way it always has.”

Maren remembers the repetitive cycles of her eating, which always begin with a boy from school inviting her to his room. The events always unfolded the same way, and then she and her mother would move. Maren has a fatalistic attitude about her chances, and about human nature. Every promise to change becomes a prophecy that the change will never happen.

“The passage of time is the only thing we can be sure of in this world.”

Mrs. Harmon talks to Maren about her age, her marriage, and her eventual death. She finds the ticking of her clock reassuring because it is always constant and reliable. The clock also ticks loudly, which makes it hard to ignore. Maren needs more positive consistency in her life, and Mrs. Harmon’s perspective helps her.

“‘I don’t see what the point of it is, if you’re not going to finish it.’

‘Can’t you say the same for livin’? Just goes on and on, and no reason for it.’”

Sully and Maren talk about the meaning of life as he adds Mrs. Harmon’s hair to his rope. The point of the rope is not that it will come to an end. Sully feels no more reason to pretend that it has a purpose that to pretend that life has meaning. The rope also gives him a way to show off for Maren and to display a lifetime of killing.

“Everyone is lonely, you can’t do something just because you’re lonely.”

Maren thinks this after eating Andy. She understands why Andy pressures her for affection and company, but that doesn’t mean she condones his behavior. Maren is lonely as well, but she doesn’t use it to justify anything she does. She doesn’t believe he deserves what she does to him, however. Andy’s loneliness will be matched and amplified during her later interactions with Travis.

“You find what you expect. That’s what I’m getting at.”

Lee tells Maren that there’s a reason she’s met two people like her in one week. He accepts what he is, and Lee is aware that preconceived notions, while not always accurate, are often unavoidable. His comment also suggests that if he and Maren had been more observant, perhaps they would have encountered more eaters than they are aware of.

“Lee didn’t comment, but I could tell he was listening to me—really listening. No matter what he called himself, I knew he was my friend.”

Maren tells Lee about her time with Mrs. Harmon and Sully. For the first time, she feels as though someone is listening. Lee has not said they are friends yet, but Maren can’t imagine what being a friend means if it doesn’t mean someone who listens. He isn’t pressuring her, and he doesn’t want anything specific from her.

“The truth is like the waiting jaws of a monster, a more menacing monster than I’ll ever be. It yawns beneath your feet, and you can’t escape it, and as soon as you drop, it chews you to pieces.”

At the state park, Maren thinks about Lee asking whether her mother was afraid of her. Maren doesn’t want it to be true, but she can’t deny it. Maren wants to escape the truth or at least to distract herself from it. The truth is a threat to her, and she hates herself when she thinks about what is real.

“Forgiveness was a word that belonged to that other language, the one that vanished as soon as I woke up.”

Maren dreams of being at a Midnight Mission in church. When the reverend and his congregation tell her to kneel and receive a blessing, she knows they do not mean forgiveness. Forgiveness is a concept that she thinks only applies to other people. She can’t forgive herself for her nature, which makes it harder for her to forgive other people for theirs.

“There’s something about him, Maren. Like he knows you.”

Lee instantly distrusts Sully. He sees Sully looking at Maren with a familiarity that doesn’t match his claims that he found them by accident. Lee isn’t feeling jealous, but protective. His instincts about Sully turn out to be correct, but Maren’s reaction to Sully isn’t unreasonable given that she hasn’t caught him in any lies yet.

“‘Fight for him,’ I thought. Don’t let her get away with it.”

After the teenage girl working the carnival game denies the boy his prize, Maren watches him cry to his mother. She wants the mother to fix the situation and show the boy that she can make the world right for him. Maren doesn’t want to see another mother abdicating her responsibility or let someone mistreat their child.

“My husband understood that no one feels the loss of a child more than his mother.”

Barbara Yearly explains how she and Dan adopted Frank after their son died. Barbara says her judgment may have been faulty, but Dan let her decide for both of him. Her husband never pretended that he could feel the loss in the same way as she did. Maren doubts that her mother felt the same pain after abandoning her.

“The trouble with asking questions is that one always leads to another. Where would I be in twenty years? Would I always have to live in other people’s homes, pretending they were mine? Who would I travel with—or what if I had to travel alone—or what if I couldn’t travel? Would I ever be at peace with who I was and what I’d done? How could I be?”

Maren looks at her father’s picture in the Sandhorn yearbook. Looking at him makes her realize, all over again, what she has lost and what she has been denied. Not only did she not get to meet her father, he is now in an psychiatric hospital. The boy in the yearbook did not get to explore his potential, including his ability to be her father.

“I wanted to comfort him—not just pat his hand and tell him how sorry I was, but actually make things better. If I had to be a monster, why couldn’t I have some sort of magical power that might fix this for him?”

Lee tells Maren the story about losing Rachel and about Rachel’s father forbidding him from seeing her. Maren thinks this might be the first legitimate heartbreak she has seen. She hates that she has all of the bad qualities of a monster, but nothing useful or redeemable in herself that she can use to ease his pain.

“I often wonder why the Yearlys kept me. But I guess they couldn’t send me back without feeling they had gone back on a promise, and that would have made them bad people. No one, not even me, wants to think they are a bad person.”

In his letter to Maren, Frank describes his confusion about his situation in the Yearly household growing up. They tried to do right by Frank, even though they could not love him as they had their son, Tom. As he says, perhaps they didn’t want to have to view themselves as promise breakers. If they would have seen themselves as bad people if they didn’t honor their commitment to Frank and the adoption agency, it reinforces the fact that it couldn’t have been easy for Janelle to abandon Maren.

“Sometimes it’s the worst things in life that have the most to teach us. You take what you can, and as for the ugly parts—well, you ‘leave it go and get on with the business of living,’ as my Dougie used to say.”

In a dream, Mrs. Harmon tells Maren not to discount the value of life’s ugly moments. There is no way to remove the dark parts of life, so it’s best to learn from them whenever possible. At this point, however, Mrs. Harmon is dead. Even in dreams, she remains the most compassionate, positive adult in the novel.

“Every kid’s a mistake…every kid who ever was. You see that, don’t ya Missy?”

Sully tells Maren about how the Yearlys took his son away. Now he’s going to kill Maren to fix the mistake. In his view, every child deserves the same fate. Sully is so loathsome, and so contemptuous of humanity, that he can’t imagine a world in which a new child is anything to celebrate. He doesn’t think that he, Maren, and Lee are more flawed than anyone else, given his view that every birth is an error.

“In that moment, I felt sorry for the man. It was like he hadn’t looked in a mirror in forty years. I thought, too, of how Mama had cared for me and protected me. Sully would never know what it felt like to be loved—or near enough to it.”

When Sully claims to have killed Lee, Maren pities him. She has felt alone at times, but now she realizes that she has never been alone like Sully. He legitimately has no one, and he is trying to kill the last person to whom he has a real attachment. Maren had a mother, she got to meet her father, and Lee has looked out for her. Sully has always been alone, and deservedly so.

“When held me everything had melted away, everything dark and ugly and rotten inside of me. Lee had made me pure. He’d let me do it. But I lay in bed for a long time, wishing with all my heart that he hadn’t. Now his name was written there too.”

Maren wakes up, and Lee is gone. For a moment, it’s unclear whether she ate him. However, she has now added his name to the list of her victims, and her heart, as the act of consuming him makes him a part of her. When she says that Lee made her pure, Maren means that, at least in part, he helped her forget the ugliness in her life and in her self-image. She isn’t sure whether she can feel that way alone, and she isn’t sure that she can ever afford to get that close to someone again.

“It just seemed wrong all of a sudden to be wearing a reminder of the love of somebody else’s life, when I could never have one of my own.”

After Jason asks to see the locket with Douglas Harmon’s picture inside, Maren can’t wear it anymore. It doesn’t act as a reminder of something she has and loves, but as a reminder of what she lacks. Douglas was not her husband, and the wife who loved him is gone, eaten by Sully. Maren is embracing her new identity, but it requires her to stop wanting certain things.

“Sometimes you don’t know how true something is until you’ve put the words around it.”

Maren tells Jason she can’t be sure they won’t be caught. When she says it, the remark is both insightful and funny to her. Maren has spent so long hiding the truth and being ashamed of the truth that it is a relief to vocalize and articulate it, even if she does so in coded threats that Jason doesn’t recognize.