The Wife Upstairs

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and pregnancy loss.

Sylvia is the primary protagonist of The Wife Upstairs. She is in her mid-twenties and struggling financially after being wrongfully fired from her previous caregiving role after her client’s daughter framed her for stealing jewelry, which is why she is desperate for the job in Montauk. She is also saddled with medical debt after recovering from a brutal attack by her father, who beat Sylvia badly after discovering that she was pregnant with her high school boyfriend Freddy’s baby, leaving her with broken bones and causing her to lose her pregnancy. Sylvia and Freddy tried to make their relationship work, but the financial strain tore them apart.

Though Sylvia initially blames Freddy for their difficulties (even thinking at one point, “My whole life is his fault” [9]), she later takes a more mature look at their situation, thinking, “I had fallen in love with Freddy in high school, and everything about him seemed so glamorous then. There was nothing glamorous about our lives right now. We were stuck in a hole we would never get out of” (142). Sylvia’s use of the collective pronoun “we” illustrates her understanding that they both suffer from the grief of losing their baby and the stress of crushing debt.