All Your Perfects

Quinn is the protagonist of All Your Perfects, a dynamic character who changes over the course of the novel. She’s a kind, loving person who deeply wants to be a mother, possibly because of her distance and neglect by her own mother. After her father’s death in her adolescence, Quinn’s childhood family consisted of herself, her mother Avril, and her sister Ava. Though Quinn and Ava are close, Quinn has always felt unwanted by her mother, who was never a maternal figure. The sisters even have a running joke in which they describe their mother as “your mother” instead of “our mother,” indicating the distance they feel from her.

As a character, Quinn represents and reflects the experience of many women who struggle with infertility; in this way, she creates space for Hoover to interrogate assumptions about femininity and the pain many women experience when they are unable to conceive and carry a child. Quinn also subverts stereotypes of women as emotional and talkative through her repression of feelings and tendency to shut down instead of talking to her husband, Graham.

Quinn is a dynamic character because she changes and grows throughout the course of the novel. The “Then” and “Now” structure of the novel allows the reader to see how Quinn has changed from “Then” to “Now,” but there are also significant changes within the span of “Now”—namely that Quinn, who’s become lost in her pain, is unable to recognize the “perfect” things she does have.