47 pages • 1 hour read
She's Not Sorry
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Themes
Stalled Recovery From Trauma
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains depictions of childhood trauma, abuse, suicide, and mental health conditions.
She’s Not Sorry examines the individual’s journey toward trauma recovery by way of Meghan Michaels’s relationship with her patient Caitlin Beckett. Though far removed in time from the event that traumatized Meghan—the death of her sister—this relationship reveals not only that Meghan has not healed from Bethany’s death but suggests that she has resisted doing so.
When Caitlin is first admitted to the hospital, Meghan’s fellow nurses and Caitlin’s family believe that Caitlin attempted to die by suicide. The alleged incident “stirs up memories of [Meghan’s sister] Bethany and brings back all the emotion [Meghan] felt after she died” (52). Caitlin reminds Meghan of her sister’s death by suicide years prior even though she knows that Caitlin’s fall was not a suicide attempt. Therefore, caring for Caitlin challenges Meghan emotionally and psychologically. When she’s working with Caitlin and listening to the other nurses discuss her case, Meghan often “feel[s] sick inside” because Caitlin’s condition triggers her traumatic memories of the past (15). She tells herself that Caitlin “shouldn’t upset [her] any more than every other patient, but she does, for different reasons” (15). Meghan’s reaction to Caitlin illustrates how the individual’s trauma lodges in the body and can reawaken years after the trauma, explaining why Meghan’s intellectual understanding that Caitlin wasn’t “bent on dying” matters so little (52).
Even so, the novel implies that Meghan would be better equipped to cope with Caitlin’s condition if she had worked through her sister’s loss. Instead, her turmoil compounds on itself: Meghan experiences new trauma from her encounter with Caitlin on the bridge and from all of the things that Caitlin did to her when she was pretending to be Nat. Caring for Caitlin reminds Meghan of both and therefore stirs up her guilt. Because Meghan is desperate to protect herself, she attempts to hide from her trauma instead of confronting it. She doesn’t acknowledge her pain and mistakes, her guilt and grief, because she’s afraid of facing the repercussions. For this reason, Meghan can’t pursue healing and recovery. She resists acknowledging, naming, and facing her trauma because she fears fracturing her already tenuous sense of self, but in doing so, she remains defined by it anyway.
That Meghan herself is responsible for Caitlin’s condition—and thus for her own retraumatization—symbolically underscores this point. Meghan’s inability to heal stems from her suppression of her past, the psychological violence of which matches her physical aggression toward Caitlin.
The Impact of Past Actions on Present Circumstances
The novel explores the ways in which an individual’s past actions impact their present circumstances via Meghan’s history with Caitlin and her complex familial past. Though Meghan consistently acts on the presumption that she can erase her history, the novel captures the futility of trying to hide from one’s past, suggesting that it always reemerges in the present.
Meghan knows how and why Caitlin fell from the bridge when Caitlin is admitted to the hospital. She doesn’t own her involvement in Caitlin’s condition, however, because she’s afraid of facing the repercussions of her past actions. Indeed, she goes so far as to kill Caitlin by giving her another patient’s insulin shot because she’s so desperate to cover up her mistakes. She knows that she “might lose [her] job” and “might lose [her] license” but decides that she’s “okay with that, if it means keeping [her] out of jail” (250). Therefore, Meghan has convinced herself that she has the power and ability to escape from and even eradicate her past. She believes that feigning innocence, goodness, and humility can bury her misdeeds and liberate her from their potential consequences.
Meghan acts in these ways with Caitlin because she has dealt with her familial situation in a similar way. Years prior, Meghan cheated on her husband, Ben Long, and got pregnant with her daughter, Sienna. Instead of telling Ben, she hid the truth of Sienna’s paternity, convinced that she could cut the proverbial cord between her past and present. Her behavior illustrates her broader belief that her past doesn’t have to have any bearing on her present and that she can remake reality and herself however she chooses. This is why she decides to kill Caitlin and risk her job. She decides that if she “eventually get[s] fired or [has] her license revoked,” she “can switch careers altogether and become something else, become someone else” (287). This manner of thinking underscores Meghan’s desperation to disregard the interconnection of her past and present.
In spite of her denial, however, Meghan’s past consistently inflects her present. Indeed, the reason that Meghan pushes Caitlin over the edge of the pedestrian bridge is because she fears that Caitlin will reveal her past mistakes and secrets to Ben and Sienna. She is determined to segregate the past and present so that she can control others’ perception of her. Furthermore, Meghan’s longtime determination to prove herself to be a good, sacrificial, and caring person is entirely inspired by her past. In the present, she’s trying to convey her morality and sensitivity to cover up the person she was before. Ultimately, her efforts are for naught, and the novel’s ambiguous ending implies that Meghan will one day have to face what she did to Caitlin.
Secrets and Their Destructive Consequences
The novel explores the emotional, psychological, and interpersonal consequences of keeping secrets by way of Meghan’s fraught and mysterious past. At the start of the novel, Meghan casts herself as a caring, compassionate, and giving person. She sees her work as a nurse and her life as a single mother as evidence of her fundamentally good character and sacrificial nature. However, as Meghan’s narrative unfolds and Meghan confronts her complex past, her character begins to mutate on the page, her narrative voice growing less reliable as it emerges that Meghan has several secrets that she’s keeping from her loved ones and even from herself. This narrative effect, which works to distance readers increasingly from the novel’s protagonist, mirrors the overall course of Meghan’s relationships, highlighting the destructive results of secrecy.
Although Meghan has told no one the truth about Sienna’s paternity, her guilt draws the secret out of her once she and Nat Cohen become friends. She feels grateful that she and Nat “came into each other’s lives at just the right time” because she’s been lonely and emotionally overwhelmed (173). She therefore shares her secret with Nat because she’s desperate for love, companionship, and trust, not recognizing that it is her very secrets that have precluded her from developing such relationships. Her broken dynamics with both Ben and Sienna are the result of Meghan’s deceptions and lies. She can’t emotionally engage with her family in an authentic manner because she has hidden the truth from them and refused to accept responsibility for her mistakes.
Meghan similarly hides from her mistakes in the context of her relationship with Caitlin. After she pushes Caitlin over the edge of the pedestrian bridge, she tells herself “to act like nothing is wrong, like caring for Caitlin Beckett doesn’t upset [her]” (239). She is therefore deciding to bury the truth about Caitlin and to hide from yet another of her dark secrets. She doesn’t admit to her involvement in Caitlin’s condition because she has made a habit of hiding from the truth to avoid the repercussions of her misdeeds and to control both others’ perceptions of her and her own sense of reality. The fact that she has gotten away with this encourages increasingly reckless and immoral behavior—e.g., killing Caitlin. Meghan doesn’t go to jail for her actions by the end of the novel, but her secrets do impact her mind, heart, and body. In these ways, the novel captures how keeping secrets might fracture an individual’s relationships and disrupt their peace of mind.
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