Reading this book, I felt connected to the characters and hung off of each word they said or thought. I am absolutely in love with Jamie, flaws and all. He had this sort of charm that seemed irresistible. I also connected a lot with Laura, how she felt about her appearance, how she thought, and how she saw life, reminded me of myself. As she changed and grew throughout the book, I felt myself changing and growing with her. A connection like that can really help you understand a book and analyze it.
There were many possible themes for this book, for example: love, death, racism, and sin. However, two themes in particular came to my mind and stuck: emptiness and passion. They are basically polar opposites, yet still relate to each other; without passion, a person is empty. One passage from Laura really stayed in my mind, and was what made me think of those themes:
“I simply got up and went on. I bathed my sour body, combed my hair, put on a clean dress and took up my roles of wife and mother again, though without really inhabiting them. After a time I realized that inhabiting them wasn’t required. As long as I did what was expected of me— cooked the meals, kissed the cuts and scrapes and made them better, accepted Henry’s renewed nocturnal attentions— my family was content. I hated them for that, a little.”
Some people can go through the motions of their day to day tasks with little to no passion, only doing it for the purpose of getting it done. They get by doing everything with the least amount of effort, getting things done without really “inhabiting” it or yourself, completely and utterly empty and emotionless. You are yourself, but a hollow, desolate version of yourself. I’ve experienced this first hand and it’s like living a life that lacks meaning or sincerity. The worst part is that this happens without the loved ones around you noticing a difference at all. It makes you feel unnoticed, like they only care about the things you do and not how you feel or who you are.
Laura feels this hatred of living on the mud-covered farm and once she found something good in her life, the upcoming son she was carrying and the promise of an actual house, it was soon ripped from her hands, leaving her with nothing. The miscarriage was what finally broke her, she felt so much sorrow until she finally felt nothing. She dreaded the life that her husband Henry loved so much. The only thing that can break through the emptiness is passion. Her family seemed content with the uninhabited Laura, maybe that’s why she felt such passion for Jamie. He noticed her, and even went out of his way to please her; as soon as he moved in and came into their lives, Laura inhabited herself again.
Passion is a powerful thing, it’s an uncontrollable and strong love for something. It can be for anything, in my case it’s a hobby: theatre, in Laura’s case it’s a person: Jamie. Passion can fill your life and give you purpose, it may even be the biggest part of our lives. Henry got to live doing his passion everyday on the farm, and left Laura without one. She tried to make the kids her passion, which worked for a while, but she still found herself empty. It was Jamie that was her passion, and once she finally got what she’d been craving, she realized that what she had fallen in love with was the idea of Jamie.
“The realization stunned me, though it shouldn’t have. He’d given me all the clues I needed to see the weakness at the core of him, and the darkness. I’d ignored them, preferring to believe the fiction. Jamie had created that fiction, acting the part almost to perfection, but I’d been the one who swallowed it whole. I was to blame, for having fallen in love with a figment.”
One thing I got out of it is that, maybe we need to realize that not everything or everyone is perfect, like fiction can be. If we expect things to be perfect, we will end up disappointed and empty. Sometimes we just have to find passion in what we already have, just like Laura did in the end.
