51 pages • 1 hour read
Beautiful Ugly
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Chapters 10-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Small Crowd”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child sexual abuse.
Grady reflects on island life as he and Sandy drive. Finally, they arrive at the House on the Hill, where Sandy and Midge grew up. Over dinner and drinks, the sisters tell Grady more about the Isle of Amberly, Charles Whittaker, and writing. Grady silently reflects on his decision to steal Charles’s idea throughout their conversation.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Almost Exactly”
Grady tells the sisters about Abby’s support for his writing career, omitting the fact that she disappeared. The conversation turns to the sisters’ relationships with the island. They muse on the “eternal human quest for happiness” and the elusiveness of home (85). They also talk about the other islanders, their occupations, and their families.
Then Midge reveals that Sandy is also the Amberly sheriff, suggesting that Grady pick her brain if he’s writing a crime novel. She alludes to the time a woman disappeared on the island and a dead man washed up missing a hand. Unnerved, Grady tells them about the hand bones.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Perfectly Imperfect: Abby”
The week before her disappearance, Abby continues her therapy session. When the therapist asks about her godmother and birth mother, Abby remembers her childhood. She was sexually abused by her piano teacher, and when her mother discovered the truth, she attacked the man with an axe and sent Abby away.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Silent Conversation: Grady”
In the present, Sandy and Grady return to his cabin. Grady hides Charles’s manuscript and then lifts the floorboard. The hand bones are missing. Sandy suggests Grady’s sleeplessness and writing habits are getting to him and encourages him to rest.
After she leaves, Grady has several drinks and opens an envelope he found slipped under the door. Inside, he finds an article written by Abby when she was a journalist about a woman who was wrongfully convicted of murder. The woman, Coraline Thatcher, killed a man who sexually abused her daughter when he tried to attack her. Since her acquittal, Coraline hasn’t been able to recover her life or reconnect with her daughter.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Innocent Trial”
Grady remembers the article but doesn’t understand why someone would leave it for him now. Then he wonders if Cora Christie might be Coraline. He also wonders if the family of the man Coraline killed was pursuing Abby, as she was being harassed before her disappearance. Confused, Grady lies awake thinking about Abby’s fate and his writing career. Suddenly he notices “a face in the window” (104).
Chapter 15 Summary: “Silent Scream”
Panicking, Grady searches the cabin for something to use as a weapon. He races outside, calling after the person who was in the window. Then he hears a harmonica playing and when he returns inside, discovers the harmonica he saw in Charles’s desk is missing.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Busy Doing Nothing”
Unable to sleep, Grady stays up editing Charles’s manuscript. In the morning, he takes Columbo for a walk, eventually arriving at the church. Inside, he notices the church roof repair fund and donates his wedding band to the cause. Then he meets Reverend Melody Bates, who tells him about the church and the inscriptions outside. She also invites him to visit the cemetery out back.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Devout Atheist”
In the cemetery, Grady discovers Charles’s grave. An old woman appears and warns Grady to leave the island before something bad happens. He tries to ask why, but she disappears. Afterward, he visits Cora’s shop for a coffee and newspaper. He tries asking Cora about her past to deduce if she’s Coraline, but she evades his questions, insisting he seems unwell. She offers him bog myrtle tea to cure his insomnia.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Clearly Confused”
Grady stops at the butcher shop to buy meat for dinner. Inside, he chats with the owners Alex and Mary. The uncomfortable exchange convinces him something is wrong with the islanders.
Chapter 19 Summary: “One-Man Band”
Back at the cabin, Grady discovers another envelope slipped under the door. It contains another article by Abby about a ruined family funeral. Grady doesn’t understand its contents but is convinced that the articles are connected to her disappearance.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Sweet Sorrow: Abby”
A week before her disappearance, Abby tells the therapist more about her marriage. She knows she wants more than she has with Grady but isn’t sure how to get it. She remembers a party she attended with him. He spent the whole time talking and flirting with other women and ignored her. Afterward, she confronted him, feeling frustrated that he was always preoccupied with his books, never spent time with her, and ignored the topic of having kids. He reminded her that they’d agreed not to have children and insisted the party was for his career. Then they had sex in a spare room.
Abby tells the therapist she still loves Grady, and Grady thinks he still loves her but doesn’t realize she’s changed.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Big Baby: Grady”
Now, Grady remembers the time he and Abby took a trip together. On the trip, they got into an argument about having kids—one of the only things they fought about. When Abby brought it up, Grady insisted they couldn’t have a baby if she didn’t take a year off of work. He still didn’t want children because he needed peace to write. Then they visited a Zoltar machine that gave Abby a fortune. She didn’t show it to him, but he read it secretly. The fortune encouraged her to do what she needed to do to make herself happy.
Grady pulls himself out of his memories and reminds himself to focus on the future. He decides he must let Abby go.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Stupidly Brilliant”
Grady spends the next six weeks writing. He only stops to walk Columbo, eat, and occasionally sleep. He lightly edits Charles’s manuscript and gradually turns it into his own. One day he receives a note from Kitty commending his new idea. When he finishes the draft, he asks Cora to order a printer so he can mail Kitty a hard copy. He also asks about the ferry schedule, as he plans to leave once he’s done with the novel. Cora is surprised he wants to leave.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Backseat Driver”
Sandy stops over one day to drop off the printer. He asks her about the ferry schedule, and she’s also surprised he wants to leave. She then reveals that Charles’s old car is in the shed and invites him to use it.
Before bringing the printed manuscript to Christie’s, Grady asks his Magic 8 Ball about his book. On the drive, he considers what it’ll be like to return to London.
Chapters 10-23 Analysis
The longer that Grady is on the Isle of Amberly the more pronounced the Psychological Effects of Isolation become for his character. Grady is doing his best “to stop reliving the past and focus on [his] future” so that he can finish his novel and regain control of his life (141). His devotion to his work compels him to spend roughly two months doing nothing but “writ[ing], eat[ing], occasionally sleep[ing], and “tak[ing] Columbo for walks in the forest or along the coast” (143). Grady intermittently visits the village for supplies, but predominantly remains in the isolated cabin, avoiding sleep and drinking heavily. The more alcohol he consumes and the more time he spends in his fictional world, the more tired he grows and the more compromised his perspective becomes.
Grady’s isolation also intensifies the Interplay Between Reality and Fiction. His compromised perspective and debatable reliability as a narrator is a trope of the psychological thriller genre that increases tension as what he says becomes more questionable and reality, as a result, more uncertain. He grows increasingly estranged from reality because he isn’t taking care of himself and he’s in an isolated locale. Separated from mainstream society, with “no phones, no internet, no social media, no news apps, no cinemas, no museums, no art galleries” (76), Grady has nobody and nothing to ground him in what’s real. As a result, his mental and emotional states become more tenuous and he begins to see, hear, and experience things that he cannot verify. Feeney uses the genre trope of isolation and the literary device of the unreliable narrator together to intensify the narrative atmosphere, heighten the narrative mystery, and mobilize the narrative plot line.
Grady’s worsening confusion is augmented by his ongoing moral dilemmas—another staple of the genre. Grady’s character is developed as morally ambiguous through his decision to steal Charles Whittaker’s manuscript and pass it off as his original work. Grady convinces himself this is “such a good idea” because it’s “the only one [he’s] got” (82). He has chosen to break his moral code to deliver himself from his vocational frustration and his immobilizing grief. Despite the seeming brilliance of his plan, Grady’s uncertain grasp of reality implies that he feels guilty for what he is doing and is unconsciously terrified of being found out. His behavior in Chapter 13 conveys his unacknowledged guilt and fear. As soon as he invites Sandy into the cabin, Grady frets about hiding “the precious manuscript on the desk” (96). He doesn’t have time to do so, but “turn[s] the first page of the manuscript over” so that the title and byline “cannot be read” (96). His secretive behavior reveals that he knows what he’s doing is wrong and is trying to avoid being held accountable. To quash his guilt and anxiety over the manuscript, Grady drinks more and more. His increasingly compromised state of mind fuels his delusions and unease. The novel uses his growing unrest to show how morally dubious behaviors have personal and psychological effects on the individual. No one has confronted Grady for his actions, but his internal unrest is an immediate consequence of his crime.
Abby’s chapters in this section develop both the novel’s subplot and its exploration of The Line Between Love and Obsession. Abby’s chapters are set one week before her disappearance and depict her ongoing session with a therapist. This narrative context affects a confessional tone as Abby entrusts her secrets to an unbiased party for the first time. Her straightforward assessment of her marriage creates the impression that her narration is more reliable than Grady’s and develops a formal tension with Grady’s surrounding chapters. In Grady’s chapters, he presents himself as the hero of the story. When he mentions Abby, it is primarily about himself and his undying love for her.
In contrast, Abby’s chapters depict Grady as an oblivious, self-involved character who has no understanding of who Abby is and what she wants. The disparities between these two points of view intensify the narrative conflict by casting more doubt on Grady’s’ perspective. In light of Abby’s narrative account, Grady appears to be possessive rather than loving. He defines his feelings for Abby as love but cannot see how his desire to control her and refusal to listen to her are more about obsession than love. The more that Abby’s character is developed from her point of view in her chapters, the more sympathetic she appears, and the more complicated her disappearance seems. The novel’s structure illustrates how a lack of communication between spouses might compromise their perceptions of reality. In particular, Grady sees Abby in a distorted way because he’s perpetually caught in his fictional world and makes no effort to understand her point of view.
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