51 pages • 1 hour read
Beautiful Ugly
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Prologue-Chapter 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Happily Married”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use.
Forty-year-old Grady Green calls his wife Abby Goldman to see when she’ll be home. He’s eager for her to arrive in time for the call from his literary agency. Abby assures him that she’s close and has their celebratory fish and chips with her. They hang up and Grady waits anxiously for his agent Kitty Goldman’s call. He’s been a writer for years and hopes his most recent publication has made him a New York Times bestselling author.
Kitty calls before Abby gets home and announces the hoped-for news. Although thrilled, Grady feels disappointed that Abby missed the announcement. He loves her more than anything but feels alone. He pours himself a drink and calls her with the news. She congratulates him and professes her love for the first time in a while.
Suddenly, her tone changes. She tells Grady there is a body in the road. Grady warns her not to get out of the car, but she does so anyway, leaving the call connected inside her car. Grady listens as someone enters the car and starts breathing into the phone. He races out into the night, calling for Abby, but she is nowhere to be found.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Good Grief”
A year later, Grady visits Kitty at her office, bringing his dog Columbo with him. Kitty remarks on his haggard appearance. He hasn’t been able to sleep since Abby’s disappearance, which remains unsolved. He studies Kitty’s framed photo of Abby, missing his wife. Kitty is her godmother and was devastated by her disappearance, too.
Kitty urges Grady to start writing again before the agency drops him. She reveals that she inherited the late famous author Charles Whittaker’s “writing shed in the Scottish Highlands” and suggests Grady use it to finish his new novel (17). Kitty writes him a check and insists he can stay at the cabin as long as he needs, as she knows he had to sell his flat and is short on money. Grady accepts and leaves the office feeling happy.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Only Option”
On the drive to Scotland from his home in London, Grady reflects on his life over the past year and how losing Abby has changed him. He arrives at the port and spends the night in the lot near the Isle of Amberly ferry. In the morning, he talks with the ferrywoman, who informs him that nonresidents can’t bring their cars onto the island. Grady reluctantly consents, grabbing his bags and boarding the boat with Columbo. On board, Grady studies the view. He gets a bad feeling but dismisses it, reminding himself that he’s on an adventure. Suddenly, he sees a woman who resembles Abby and tries to chase her, but she disappears.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Awfully Good”
The ferry docks on the island. Grady looks for Abby again but convinces himself that his sleeplessness must be getting to him. At the information office, he runs into the ferrywoman again, who introduces herself as Sandy MacIntyre. She offers him a ride when she learns that he’s staying in Charles’s old cabin. On the way, they chat about island life until Grady sees the woman who resembles Abby again. He demands Sandy stop the car, jumps out, and races into the shop where the woman went. Abby isn’t there.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Same Difference”
As they continue, Sandy identifies the redwood trees, revealing that the islanders call them ghost trees. When they arrive at the cabin, she explains that the island has cell service, internet, or phones, so he’ll have to use the map and compass she’s given him to get around, Before leaving, she invites him to join her and her sister Midge MacIntyre for dinner the following evening.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Passive-Aggressive”
Grady and Columbo walk up to the cabin, studying the forested view along the way. Grady realizes the house is on a cliff, which inspired its name, The Edge. Inside, he’s surprised to find the cabin clean, as Kitty said no one has stayed there since Charles’s death. He settles in and pours himself several drinks, remembering Abby’s frustration with his drinking habits. He puts on some music and rifles through Charles’s desk. Columbo starts barking at the floor, and when Grady lifts the floorboard, he discovers human hand bones arranged on a velvet cushion.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Random Order”
Unnerved, Grady pours himself another drink. Then he realizes the hand is pointing towards a pile of papers, which he discovers are Charles’s last unpublished manuscript. Grady spends the rest of the night drinking and reading the manuscript.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Definitely Maybe: Abby”
The week before Abby’s disappearance, she visits a therapist and confesses her desire to leave Grady. She doesn’t usually trust people with her problems and struggles to open up to the therapist. The woman encourages her to start at the beginning, and Abby silently reflects on how she and Grady met.
They were on the same flight to New York and Grady thought she’d taken his seat. He then moved seats to sit near her, introducing himself as a writer. Fascinated by writers, Abby engaged him in conversation. Then she let him touch her beneath a blanket. When they deplaned, they ran into each other again at Arrivals, where Grady gave her chocolate and flowers. They spent the rest of the day exploring New York together.
Abby doesn’t share this story with the therapist. Instead, she admits that Grady doesn’t really know her, and she’s worried he doesn’t trust her.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Modestly Ambitious: Grady”
Grady writes a note to Kitty, outlining a manuscript idea that he’s stolen from Charles. In the morning, he walks to Cora Christie’s shop, which doubles as a post office. Outside, he notices a phone booth but discovers it doesn’t work. Inside, Cora explains that the booth is now a library and that the island’s phone cables were recently damaged. She rings up Grady’s groceries and posts his letter.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Deafening Silence”
Grady considers stopping at the local bar, the Stumble Inn, for a drink, but it’s closed because it’s off-season and only 25 people live on the island. Then he hears the phone in the phone booth ring. When he picks it up, all he hears is the ocean. Cora appears and scolds him for using an inoperable phone. Grady worries about his mental health, as he hasn’t slept for some time.
Walking back to the cabin, Grady reflects on his decision to steal Charles’s manuscript. He doesn’t know if he did the right thing but knows his career is over if he doesn’t produce another book. Back at the cabin, he falls asleep until Sandy’s knock wakes him. She drives him to Midge’s house for dinner. On the way, she reveals that there are no birds on the island and explains why.
Prologue-Chapter 9 Analysis
The novel’s opening chapters are primarily told from the protagonist Grady Green’s first-person point of view. Chapter 7 disrupts this structure and introduces Grady’s wife Abby Goldman’s first-person point of view, taking the narrative back to a week before her disappearance. This narrative choice establishes a conflict between the husband and wife that is based on what they want out of their life together and how they define love, introducing the novel’s explorations of The Line Between Love and Obsession. At the start of the novel, Grady and Abby are experiencing marital difficulties. While Abby feels like she “lost part of [her]self when [she] got married” and is considering leaving Grady, Grady is convinced that Abby is the love of his life and frets over her whereabouts and loyalty to him (55). After her disappearance in the Prologue, Grady is on his own. His subsequent circumstances are defined by his loneliness, grief, and insomnia. Without Abby, Grady doesn’t know who he is; since their marriage, Grady has regarded Abby as his “reason for living” (12). Her unresolved disappearance “keeps [him] awake at night” and stops him from working on his new novel (12). Without his writing, he feels even more unmoored, as writing is integral to his sense of self. Grady’s definition of love, which is dangerously close to obsession, begins this downward spiral. When Grady leaves London for the Isle of Amberly, he sets off on a healing and self-discovery journey. He needs to move beyond his wife’s disappearance to refocus on his career and put his life back together—challenges he’s unsure if he can accomplish.
This internal conflict intensifies the atmosphere around Grady’s departure for Amberly and charges Grady’s interiority. Grady’s lingering love for his absent wife and concurrent frustration with his stunted writing career unsettle his mind. Furthermore, Grady has no family, no home, and no money. “Are there any benefits to losing it all,” he begins to wonder as he sets out on his island adventure (21). Without the stability his former life in London with his wife afforded him, Grady struggles to remain in touch with reality. His narrative sways constantly between memory, imagination, dreams, and the present, capturing the Interplay Between Reality and Fiction. Grady’s obsessive relationship with his stories and writing further augments his inability to remain present. When he’s traveling to Scotland, he realizes that he hasn’t “seen much of the world for years” as he’s “locked [him]self away from reality, too busy writing” and “[m]erely existing inside [his] own head” (22). His wife’s disappearance and his subsequent grief have further estranged him from the world: “Over the last ten years,” Grady has “let [his] relationships with real people drift while [he] obsessed over fictional ones” (22). Ignoring “invitations, and most calls, texts, and emails” felt essential to “writing the real world away” and satisfying his goal of becoming a New York Times bestselling author (22). However, in the narrative present, these habits have caught up to Grady. He’s not only trapped inside his imagination and grief but also unable to distinguish the real from the imagined, the true from the invented.
The novel uses Grady’s emotional distress to render him an unreliable narrator and capture the Psychological Effects of Isolation. Even before Abby disappeared, Grady wasn’t good at making connections outside his marriage or experiencing the world beyond his insular flat. However, her disappearance and his creative immobilization finally compel him out into the unknown. Traveling to the Isle of Amberly not only offers him a new start but also thrusts him into an unfamiliar and unpredictable world. The foreign nature of this setting and the lack of outside communication further augment Grady’s alienation and confusion. He doesn’t know the rules of the island community and is staying in a remote cabin in the woods on the edge of a cliff. He doesn’t have cell service, an internet connection, a landline, or a car. The absence of these forms of communication and transportation intensifies Grady’s alienation.
The novel uses his arrival at the “abandoned writing cabin” to foreshadow coming internal conflicts for Grady (48). Without a connection to the outside world, Grady’s mental state promises to become increasingly tenuous. His state of mind is further troubled by possible sightings of his missing wife, the supposedly inoperative phone booth, and the human hand bones he discovers under the cabin floor. These occurrences infuse the narrative with mystery, heighten the narrative tension, and accelerate the narrative pacing. The more confused Grady becomes about where he is and what he’s experiencing, the more unreliable he is as a narrator and the more uncertain his world becomes. The novel uses these dynamics to show how isolation, obsession, and grief can unsettle the individual’s mind and confuse their sense of truth.
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