The Perfect Child

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, graphic violence, death, animal abuse and death, and mental illness (including postpartum psychosis and reactive attachment disorder).

Medicine and psychiatry are the central motif in The Perfect Child and even furnish the novel’s setting: The story begins in a hospital as Hannah works a shift as a nurse, and Christopher works at the same hospital as a surgeon. Janie is introduced when Christopher meets her at the hospital, and Janie has to go through an intense surgery that Christopher himself performs. In this sense, Christopher’s profession hints at The Sinister Side of Unconditional Love; he is overly invested in his patients’ welfare to the point that he cannot see them objectively.

Later, Janie starts seeing Dr. Chandler, whose advice and work with Janie help her to a degree, but only prior to Cole’s birth. Dr. Chandler’s failure to see the signs of danger in Janie means that Janie never really gets the help she needs until she is sent to a residential home. Hannah also ends up developing postpartum psychosis and spending several weeks in a psychiatric hospital. She is heavily medicated and becomes someone Christopher no longer recognizes.