79 pages • 2 hours read
Firefly Lane
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Themes
Appearance Versus Reality
Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss rape, drug addiction, and alcohol addiction.
Throughout the novel, Kate and Tully’s reality differs from what they present to others. By pretending, each character hides her true motivations or feelings regarding what are often difficult subjects.
Many instances in which Kate’s reality differs from what others see hinge on her desire to avoid judgment or her feeling that she is inferior to Tully. When Kate decides she doesn’t want to pursue journalism, she continues to feign interest because she doesn’t want to disappoint Tully or her mother, who expressed a desire for her daughter to dream big. As Kate falls deeper in love with Johnny, she pretends she doesn’t have feelings for him, even scoffing at Tully when Tully asks if it’s okay to hook up with him. Kate hides her real feelings because she believes that Johnny would never choose her over Tully. Later, Kate acts as though she is on top of her responsibilities with the kids and the house, but in reality, she is drowning. Kate chose a domestic life over a career, much to Tully’s chagrin, and creating a façade of happiness allows her to justify her choices. Kate’s hidden reality indicates that she lives much of her life concerned with others’ approval and believes that she exists in the shadow of Tully.
Tully’s deceptions stem almost entirely from her need for acceptance, a reaction to her mother’s abandonment. At the start of Tully and Kate’s relationship, Tully lies and tells Kate that her mother has cancer. She creates this false reality because she is too embarrassed to reveal her mother’s addiction, as she is concerned that people will pity or judge her. Throughout middle and high school, Tully acts and dresses in such a way as to be accepted into the popular crowd. To an observer, it would seem that Tully has many friends with whom she has meaningful relationships; however, Tully surrounds herself with others to forget her mother for a while, and none of the people she spends time with know the real her. This tendency continues throughout Tully’s life: On television, Tully is what people want her to be, and what she knows will make her popular, but internally, she is lonely and dissatisfied. Tully’s greatest fear is being alone, and with the façade that she creates, she attempts to ensure that she won’t be. However, Tully doesn’t realize that she will never be alone because she has Kate and a few other people who know the truth behind the façade and stay with her no matter what.
Love and Its Imperfections
Love is not perfect, and Hannah’s portrayal of love reflects that truth. In Firefly Lane, Hannah investigates three different kinds of love, including romantic, familial, and love between friends.
Kate and Johnny’s romance is marked by ups and downs, but it is a frank portrayal of romantic love. Their early years are filled with passion and happiness, but Kate also learns to recognize the fragility of love through her fear of losing him. Kate’s jealousies mainly stem from Johnny’s initial attraction to Tully, and throughout much of Kate’s relationship with Johnny, she believes she was his second choice and that he still has feelings for Tully. However, despite these jealousies, Kate and Johnny are happy. They build a family, work as a team to manage their responsibilities, and support one another. After Johnny is injured in a bombing, Kate’s devotion shows as she works to heal and protect him. Similarly, when Kate gets sick, the depth of Johnny’s love becomes much clearer.
Hannah also explores the nature of familial love, and she provides readers with several kinds. The Mularkeys are, to Tully, the ideal example of family love. The parents are affectionate with each other, they look out for their children, and they spend time together. As the girls get older, the Mularkeys remain a steadying force, providing advice and support when needed. However, as ideal as the Mularkeys might seem to Tully, Hannah does depict conflict within their ranks. As a teenager, Kate—and later, her own daughter, Marah—bucks the love of her family to achieve her own freedom, a natural reaction to a mother who won’t let her grow up.
Tully’s idolization of the Mularkey family comes from her abandonment by her own mother. With the Harts, Hannah explores a family broken by addiction. Tully is raised for much of her childhood by an aging grandmother who provides love and structure to young Tully. However, Tully longs for her absent mother’s love and approval. Cloud’s inability to stay in Tully’s life for long or provide any kind of emotional support deeply affects Tully’s understanding of love, as she learns early that love can come and go easily.
While romantic and familial love play important roles in this novel, the love between Kate and Tully takes center stage. Again, Hannah does not portray the love between friends as without flaws, but instead provides readers with a candid portrait of a close female friendship. Tully and Kate find each other when they are each feeling lonely and vulnerable. Kate has been rejected by her friends, and Tully is the new girl in school and has just been raped. When they find each other and realize they can trust one another, their bond is quickly sealed. Through the years, they grow into different people, in turns feeling proud and jealous of each other. Kate knows Tully well enough to shrug off her inability to apologize or stay in her own lane. Tully knows Kate well enough to feign happiness when she gets pregnant or push her to do something outside her comfort zone. Typically, when Tully and Kate argue, they drift back together and move on. After Tully ambushes Kate during a live show, Hannah leaves readers wondering if Kate and Tully will be able to salvage their friendship. However, it seems clear that even if Kate had not gotten sick, they would have likely found their way back to each other. The portrayal of friendship during Kate’s illness highlights friends’ ability to make each other laugh and feel loved even in the darkest of circumstances.
Trust as a Test of Loyalty and a Reflection of Self-Worth
Kate or Tully ask, “Do you trust me?” when one wants to push the other into something she is uncomfortable doing. In these instances, which happen periodically throughout the novel, Kate and Tully use trust as a means to test one another’s loyalty. By using this question in these circumstances, Hannah forces readers to consider whether the characters are being trustworthy in these moments. When a young Tully asks Kate to trust her that they won’t get caught sneaking out to a keg party, Tully uses Kate’s desire to be loyal to Tully as a means to get what she wants. When Kate wants to meet Chad Wiley, Tully is hesitant to let the meeting happen, so Kate challenges whether Tully trusts her. Again, Kate uses Tully’s desire to be loyal to manipulate the situation and achieve the meeting. In these instances, each character uses trust to achieve her own goals.
Hannah continues to examine the nature of trust through Kate and Tully’s relationships with each other and various other characters. Kate demonstrates a lack of trust in Tully in several situations. When she is unsure as to what career path she might take, Kate does not share that information because she does not trust that Tully won’t judge her. Even after Kate and Johnny have been married with children for years, Kate interprets Tully’s behavior with Johnny as worthy of distrust and jealousy. However, whenever she is in a difficult situation, their years of friendship cause Kate to feel a renewed sense of trust and turn to Tully for support.
While Tully does seem to trust Kate, she distrusts most others. The rape that Tully experienced as a teenager hinders her ability to trust men, as evidenced by her being overprotective of Kate at parties and disinterested in dating while in her teens. However, Chad helps her to overcome this lack of trust. Additionally, Tully’s abandonment by her mother causes her to distrust people because she believes they always leave. When Chad leaves for Tennessee, Tully does not trust his profession of love, figuring that if he loved her, he would stay. In fact, Tully seems to lack trust even in herself, doubting whether her decision to pursue her career was the right one. As Hannah reveals each character’s difficulty with trust, she also delves into how our own ideas of self-worth shape our ability to trust.
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