The Last Housewife

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death by suicide, sexual violence, trauma, self-harm, misogyny, gender essentialism, cult activity, and drug use.

“Meaning it was obviously a suicide. Right? Eight years ago, when I saw what Clem had done, I’d accepted the truth immediately—recognized that it made a deep, awful kind of sense. It had been powerful enough to break through the fog of my mind, like a lifeline cast into the sea of my disordered thinking. It had shaken me, made me see sharp and clear again. In the worst irony, Clem’s death had given me back my life.”

Shay is exploring her past, which she has ignored for years, and she realizes that Laurel’s suicide may be having a similar effect on her as Clem’s death did years prior. People react differently to trauma, and Shay feels guilty that Clem’s death spurred her to start her own life and career as a writer. Now that Shay has encountered a new lull in her life, as a housewife with writer’s block, Laurel’s death promises to “shake” her into the clarity she needs to regain control of her own life.

“Because every time I saw two people, I saw a scale, tipping this way and that. And the scale had been tipped toward Cal for a long time. Oh, he would deny it, but now he held the purse strings; now every big decision was ultimately his. It had been six months of checked charges, of attending fancy Highland Park parties on his arm, of insipid gossip and aching loneliness, of staring at the blinking cursor on my laptop’s blank screen.”

Shay’s perception of relationships as hierarchical, with one person in control and the other submitting to that control, reflects the gender roles explored in the text. Prior to quitting her job, Shay felt she had subverted this dynamic, with both her and Cal bringing in the financial security each of them needed; however, now that they are both dependent on Cal, Shay feels that she has lost control of herself and her life. Her speculation that Cal would deny this dynamic characterizes Cal as less introspective than Shay and suggests that he may be using money to control her.