50 pages • 1 hour read
Good Bad Girl: A Novel
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Character Analysis
Patience Liddell/Nellie Fletcher/Eleanor Kennedy
Patience Liddell is an active, dynamic protagonist of Good Bad Girl. Patience is an 18-year-old runaway who fled a life with her adoptive mother, Frankie, on their houseboat after Frankie refused to divulge the truth behind Patience’s biological parentage. At the start of the novel, Patience works in a care home where she has befriended Edith Elliot. She lives above Jude Kennedy’s art studio, where she gives him her paper clippings in exchange for lodging as she searches for the truth of her history. Though Patience is uncertain about where she’s come from, she’s very certain of her self-worth. In the novel’s opening chapters, Patience cleans an abusive resident’s toilet with the man’s own toothbrush. This demonstrates Patience’s spunk and desire for justice.
Patience is forced back into contact with Frankie when Patience’s proximity to Edith’s disappearance and Joy’s murder sees her sent to prison. Patience’s conversations with her cellmate, Liberty, cause her to rethink her feelings toward her mother. Patience ultimately returns to Frankie ready to hear the story that Frankie has been unable to tell. This action reveals Patience to be a deeply empathic character who can think critically about what motivates her—and make changes to how she acts and thinks based on this reflection. Her adaptability extends even to her name, which she changes as needed, making her a primary vehicle for exploring The Plurality of Identity. Ultimately, Patience’s ability to forgive and establish healing connections makes her one of the novel’s most positive characters, and it is largely through her that Frankie, Clio, and Edith are ultimately able to heal.
Clio Kennedy
Clio Kennedy is Edith’s daughter, Jude’s brother, and the biological mother of both Frankie and Patience. Clio’s life has been defined by the moment in which her child was abducted while she was at home contending with postpartum depression; this incident fractured her already tenuous relationship with Edith, resulted in her divorce, and set her on a path toward self-imposed loneliness. Through much of the narrative, Clio is associated with her pink house—a house in an upscale neighborhood that she and her ex-husband purchased even though they weren’t well-off. This house is a symbol of the life Clio envisioned for herself when she was pregnant with Patience/Eleanor: aspirations of conventional femininity (specifically, motherhood) and the prospect of upward mobility. In the years after the abduction, Clio continued to live in the house, keeping the rooms just as they were when Patience/Eleanor was a child. Clio’s treatment of the house reflects her inability to let go and her desire to eternally punish herself for the perceived transgressions of her past.
Clio is also closely associated with her shoes—brightly colored trainers that multiple characters comment on throughout the novel. These shoes are a plot point: They are the evidence on the teddy bear’s spy cam that places Clio at the scene of the crime. However, the shoes also speak to Clio’s need for control. Because so many elements of her life have spun out of her control, Clio intensely desires to control some part of her life—even something as insignificant as an ever-growing shoe collection that she can lovingly maintain. This need for control extends to how Clio presents herself to the world: She cultivates a hardened, demanding exterior to hide the vulnerability she lives with day after day.
Clio’s arc throughout the novel is a movement toward learning how to relinquish control. This first comes in the form of learning how to stop trying to decide what is best for her mother. Clio is so determined to ensure that her mother lives out her final years in comfort but far away from Clio that she doesn’t pay attention to Edith’s suffering in the care home. By the end of the novel, Clio must also learn to relinquish control over the way she has constructed her own memories. To protect her emotional well-being, Clio has convinced herself that her abducted daughter must be dead. Patience’s emergence into her life causes Clio to question these protective walls and ultimately to bring them down so that she can connect with the daughter she lost.
Frankie Fletcher
Frankie Fletcher is Clio’s biological daughter, whom a teenage Clio gave up for adoption, and the half-sister and adoptive mother of Patience. She works as a librarian in a prison. Up until Patience’s 18th birthday, Frankie lived a life that was both joyous (because of her connection to her daughter) and anxious (because she feared someone would discover she had abducted her daughter). Frankie’s habit of counting embodies both her anxiety and her desire to control it. She counts everything, from the number of stairs in a house to the number of steps it takes her to get from one side of the prison to the other. The obsessive counting makes Frankie feel more certain of the world around her; if every aspect of her life can be quantified, then her life can be controlled.
Frankie loses all control when Patience decides to run away on her 18th birthday after Frankie refuses to tell her the truth about her history. Patience’s departure guts Frankie: “[S]he feels like a ghost, sleepwalking through life, waiting for the final chapter” (49). The language is indicative of how Frankie sees the trajectory of her life: She’s always believed that one day she will have to own up to her crime and that doing so will end her relationship with Patience, as well as Frankie’s life as she’s known it. The events of the novel see Frankie escaping legal judgment for her actions and reuniting with a daughter who forgives her. Frankie’s arc is one of learning to visualize different futures after decades of convincing herself that she’s bound to only one destiny. Her movement from teaching in a prison to opening her own bookstore reflects her movement away from a life of entrapment and surveillance into a place that she is fully in control of.
Edith Elliot
Edith Elliot is Clio and Jude’s mother and Frankie and Patience’s grandmother. Edith was a single mother who worked many jobs, ranging from flight attendant to supermarket detective. Edith is a complicated character whose interactions with different people paint different pictures of her demeanor. In the care home, Edith is a sharp, empathetic, and deeply wise mentor who offers Patience advice that Patience internalizes and uses to improve her life. Clio and Jude, though, both loathe their mother—to the point that Clio refuses to take her into her home and Jude tries to have her killed. These differing viewpoints show how Edith has changed throughout her life, going from a woman who was emotionally distant and sometimes cruel toward her children to a grandmother who made the difficult choice to turn Frankie away in the hopes of protecting Clio and the young Patience/Eleanor.
Edith’s arc moves toward redemption. Edith knows that she can’t fully undo the pain that she’s caused Clio, Patience, and Frankie, but she ends her life with a lie that aims to save the other women from continued harm. She falsely confesses to killing Joy because, as she says, “I’ve been a bad mum all my life, let me be good just this once” (291). In confessing to this crime, she hopes to atone for her past. Though Edith acknowledges that she was often a difficult and “bad” person, her desire to make amends provides a model for the other women in the book: Clio and Frankie both ask Patience for their forgiveness, and Patience learns how to make up for the hurt she caused Frankie. Edith embodies the novel’s ethos that redemption is possible, which is intertwined with its consideration of Navigating Ambiguous Moralities.
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