72 pages • 2 hours read
Nina LaCourWe Are Okay
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Grief and Loss
LaCour deals explicitly with grief and loss throughout this novel. In the Acknowledgements section, she writes that the idea for this book came to her in the months after her own grandfather’s death, when she was grieving him. The reader enters Marin’s grief at a time when it has already destroyed much of her life and happiness. This choice is effective because it situates the reader in the aftermath of the loss, confronting the pain of it, while dealing out small snippets of the cause through flashbacks.
The grief that unfolds throughout the narrative is complex and multi-layered. Marin’s own grief encompasses her grandfather, her mother, her distance from Mabel, Ana and Javier, and even the life she thought she lived and the person she thought she was. The immensity of loss following her grandfather’s death came not just from his passing, but also from the truth of what he’d been keeping for her—her own mother. Gramps’s grief, too, becomes an object of study; though Marin initially struggles to see him as a man with pain of his own, she comes to understand that he has lost as much as her and still managed to keep their lives together for 15 years.
The novel portrays grief as profoundly transformative and as a thing that changes you fundamentally and forever. For example, when Marin visits the pottery shop for the first time, she thinks of the potter, “I don’t know why, but I feel like something happened to her, like there’s pain behind her smile” (68). She goes on to wonder if their loss connects them: “Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn’t yours anymore” (68). Marin feels that connection but, at the time, is so stuck in the immediacy of her grief that she is unable to visualize a path forward.
Her flight to New York both reflects and intensifies her grief and her feelings of disassociation from her self. It is not until Mabel’s visit that she begins to heal, possibly because when Mabel looks at Marin’s face, she does not see a completely different person. In welcoming Mabel and in recognizing the grief of others (Mabel’s grief at Marin’s disappearance, Gramps’s grief at the loss of his wife and daughter) she is better able to recognize that, while grief changes you, it does not necessarily undo you.
Loneliness
Marin’s loneliness is closely associated with her grief but, importantly, was present before her grandfather’s death. Of her early days at the motel, Marin reflects, “I thought I was afraid of ghosts, but I wasn’t. I was afraid of my loneliness […] the way I’d convinced myself of so much: that I wasn’t sad, that I was alone” (210). While Marin’s New York loneliness is clear and overt in the novel, her California loneliness unfolds more slowly. The loneliness Marin felt before Gramps died was complex, stemming not from actual solitude but from loving a man who was not capable of forming an authentic emotional connection with her. In this way, LaCour shows that a person can be lonely whether they are alone or not.
Marin is aware of her own loneliness and considers it repeatedly through the text. Her loneliness, though made worse through the aloneness she inflicts on herself, is depicted as a mental state of disconnection rather than a physical state of solitude. She notes, “I know that I am always alone, even when surrounded by people, so I let the emptiness in” (203). Loneliness for Marin is the absence of social and emotional ties. In her case, these ties have been amputated as a method of coping with the shocking revelations about Gramps and Birdie. In some ways, then, Marin’s loneliness is self-inflicted. She withdraws into a protective shell of isolation when her feelings of separateness are over-extended after Gramps’s disappearance and the discovery of his secret rooms.
Healing and Belonging
These three themes: grief, loneliness, and healing are all deeply intertwined throughout the novel. For Marin, the feeling of belonging is essential to her ability to heal, serving as a counterpart to her loneliness; she heals from her grief by diluting her loneliness with a new sense of belonging. Though most examples of belonging in the text are good—belonging with Hannah, belonging with Mabel, belonging with Ana and Javier—there are also some negative examples, such as belonging at the motel. Marin sees belonging as being alike enough to those around you to have a place there. There are several examples of Marin feeling like she does not belong even before she flees to New York. One incident takes place when Marin and Mabel present themselves to Ana and Javier before attending a party; the parents insist that Mabel go change, which leaves Marin “still standing before them, wearing the same dress as their daughter and waiting for them to tell me something” (79). Another occurs at the party, when their friend Courtney is so surprised that Marin has never been to the back of her own house.
Her acute need for belonging is evident after she moves into her dorm, appearing among the bright and well-prepared girls after two weeks of living in a cheap motel, unable to bathe without hearing the ghost of her grandfather in the pipes. In those passages, the reader sees how quickly Marin realizes she does not belong and how quickly she moves to remedy that externally. Hannah becomes her lifeline, providing an easy, new way to belong at college that tethers Marin to the real world. When Hannah leaves for winter break, Marin knows “why she’s afraid for me. […] I stepped in—a stunned and feral stranger—and now I’m someone she knows, and I need to stay that way. For her and for me” (2). Even Marin’s distance from Mabel stems from her feelings of not belonging. Mabel, Marin thinks, will always belong. Mabel is pretty, happy, and well-adjusted. Marin’s grief and loneliness convince her so absolutely of her own lack of belonging that she cannot conceive even of belonging in Mabel’s life.
Ultimately, Marin’s healing depends heavily on belonging. It is Mabel’s visit, Mabel’s insistence on remaining in Marin’s life, that allows Marin to build tentative, delicate connections to the community she desperately needs. Marin’s most significant breakthrough comes at the hands of Ana and Javier, who have not only offered to make her a part of their family, but who have followed through and shown up in New York to be with her for Christmas. Even more influential is Ana expressing a desire—not just a willingness—to be Marin’s mother. She says, “I wanted to be your mother. From the first night I met you, I wanted that” (230). For a young woman who has never felt truly wanted, even if she was adequately cared for, this expression of belonging is groundbreaking. She sobs in Ana’s arms as Ana tells her that her pain is okay, that being changed is okay. All the years Marin has searched for a memory of her mother are crystalized in this moment, in the arms of a woman who wants to be her mother; Marin finally remembers being in her mother’s arms as a child.
