52 pages • 1 hour read
The Good Part
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Symbols & Motifs
The Wishing Machine
Besides serving as a plot device, the wishing machine symbolizes The Consequences of Wishes of any kind. Lucy encounters the wishing machine in the shop when she is experiencing emotional turmoil and desperation. Both times, that emotional drive for change creates the magic that allows the wishing machine to work, underscoring that the machine merely manifests one’s desires. As the woman who operates it tells Lucy, “It only works if it’s with all your heart” (314).
As Lucy learns, however, the mere fact that one wants to do something doesn’t make doing so a good idea. In Chapter 4, she thinks to herself, “I’m so tired of being broke and single and stuck. I wish I could fast-forward to when I know what I’m doing, when I have some semblance of a career, when I’ve met my person” (36). Lucy gets her wish but soon realizes that the “bad” experiences” she has skipped were valuable in their own right. Moreover, her actions have had unintended consequences—e.g., Zoya is now dead. Lucy therefore ultimately reverses her original wish after learning Gratitude and Appreciation for the Present: “Please, I want to go back. I want to live every messy day—the good ones and the ones that suck—where I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know where I’m going or how to get there” (328).
The Wedding Rings
When Lucy wakes up in her future life, she finds she is married to Sam but feels uncomfortable acting like Sam’s wife when he is a total stranger to her. She finds her wedding rings and tries them on, “[b]ut then an old superstition niggles—you should never wear someone else’s wedding ring. Besides, it feels wrong, these weren’t given to [her]” (122). Sam urges her several times to put her rings back on, but it is not until she finally falls in love with Sam and starts to feel settled into her new future life that she does so. By the end of the novel, in fact, Lucy feels bereft without the rings: “I pause at the door, beset by an inexplicable feeling that I’ve forgotten something, that there’s something else I need. I go over to the bedside drawer, find my rings, and put them on, exhaling a breath” (295).
The rings are thus in one sense a way of gauging Lucy’s adaptation to her future life: The reader can trace her level of acceptance of her life by noticing her relationship to the wedding rings throughout the novel. As symbols of her love for Sam, the rings also represent The Value of Family and Friendships, Lucy’s increased willingness to wear the rings coinciding with a broader transformation in her relationships as she becomes less self-centered and more mature.
The Power Suit
The day she finds the wishing machine, Lucy is deeply disappointed when the promotion she gets at work turns out to be more of the same kind of low-level errand-running work that she was hoping to escape. She longs to be more like her boss, Melanie, whom she admires. Above all, Lucy envies Melanie’s wardrobe, which reflects her high salary and important job. Lucy thinks, “If I owned those boots, I don’t think I could be anything but deliriously happy all day long” (16). Thus, the newly 42-year-old Lucy decides to go on a shopping spree after checking her bank account and seeing a large sum there. She buys “a pair of killer heels and a fitted purple suit with epic shoulder pads” (73), after which she suddenly feels confident enough to go into the office despite not even knowing where she works.
Lucy’s initial attempts to do the job her 42-year-old self holds are rocky, underscoring the flaw in her thinking. Twenty-six-year-old Lucy conflated Melanie’s wardrobe with her confidence and authority in her position, so she thought that simply buying a suit would give her all she needed to walk into her high-level TV executive job and succeed. However, just like marriage, motherhood, and the rest of her life, her career is built on years of hard work, successes, and failures, all of which Lucy has skipped. Without those experiences, the purple power suit has no magic to make 26-year-old Lucy into a capable and confident boss, and it thus symbolizes the hollowness of Lucy’s “unearned” new life.
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