The Rachel Incident

Content Warning: This section of the guide briefly mentions abortion, drug use, child abuse, and anti-gay bias.

“‘What?’ I said, the shock of the sentence shattering the glassy reserve that I had cultivated as part of my persona. The persona broadly known as Girl Who Works in Bookshop.”

This passage illustrates Rachel’s attempts to take on different identities as she comes of age. She wants to appear sophisticated and artsy, but in doing so she suppresses many of her natural mannerisms. Part of the appeal of James Devlin as a friend is that he sees through her attempts at a persona and likes the real version of her.

“But James did steal me from Jonathan. Over the course of just a month, I would be colonised by James on a molecular level, and my personality would mould around his wherever there was space to do so. The official line is that Jonathan dumped me. The truth is that I left him for another man.”

While Rachel’s boyfriend Jonathan initially dismisses James as a threat because James is gay, it turns out that the threat is not romance but friendship. Her relationship with James takes primacy over her relationship with Jonathan because she and James share real affection.

“I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.”

A piece of Rachel’s coming-of-age narrative is learning to see her parents as human beings—flawed but lovable. The Rachel writing the story in 2022 is becoming a parent herself and looks back with regret at her college self’s inability to understand her parents and their needs.