We All Want Impossible Things

In the very first chapter, another resident of the hospice center, Ruth, plays the movie musical Fiddler on the Roof from her room down the hallway loud enough for the whole floor to hear. Throughout the novel, at various moments, Ash, who is narrating the story, will comment on hearing the musical, which becomes a kind of soundtrack to her time at Shapely. Even after Ruth dies two-thirds of the way through the story, Ash continues to think of the songs and events of the movie. The final page of the novel, in fact, contains a reference to one of the key moments in the film where the main couple—Tevye and Golde—sing a song entitled “Do You Love Me?” to one another. Imagining the rest of her life without Edi, Ash pictures Honey singing the song to her as she cries and rests in his embrace.

The first-person narrative perspective allows Ash’s inner thoughts to be narrated at length in each chapter, which makes the reader aware of Ash’s memories of various people and events that happen to be triggered by particular events in the present day.