The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains brief mentions of mental health conditions, suicide, and sexual assault.

Pen, the novel’s protagonist, is the daughter of Ted and Anna Winters. She begins the novel as a young and somewhat naïve freshman who is studying abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has been raised in wealth and comfort in the suburbs of Toronto, but she is troubled by her parents’ tumultuous marriage and divorce. Seeking stability, she rejects religion but finds “facts” to be “reassuring” (13). Excelling in school, she turned to “thin-paged, densely typed nineteenth-century novels” (13) to guide herself through the world even though, “at that age, their truths reached her only in the way one might catch a whiff, from across the fence, of a neighbor’s dinner cooking on the barbecue” (13). Part of her interest in Edinburgh is the hope that she can discover the secret to her father’s unhappiness and avoid such miserable relationships in her own life.

Pen grows as a character throughout the text, maturing from a rigid young woman and becoming someone with more empathy and compassion, especially for the flaws of her parents. She confronts both of her parents about the parts of the past that they have concealed from her, and by reading the diary of her mother, Anna, she learns that her mother does love her and never intended to leave her or die by suicide, even at her most depressed.