We All Live Here

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, bullying, and sexual content.

“‘Now, darling, I don’t want to sound stern,’ Anoushka says, sounding stern, ‘you did astonishingly well with The Rebuild. And you had that lovely little uplift in sales on the back of Dan’s terrible deeds. I suppose we should be grateful to him for that at least. But we do not want to lose visibility, do we? We do not want to be so late delivering that I might as well be launching a debut.’”

Lila Kennedy’s phone call with her literary agent, Anoushka, introduces her ongoing vocational conflict. While Lila’s last book on marital bliss was a success, she isn’t sure how to write a bestseller about orienting to single life. “Dan’s terrible deeds” continue to cloud her life in the present and threaten to keep her from maintaining her authorial reputation.

“Some days, Lila feels as if she’s battling everything: the furious, slippery contents of her brain, her wavering, unreliable hormones, her weight, her ex-husband, her house’s attempts to fall down around her ears, the world in general.”

The narrator’s use of figurative language enacts Lila’s intense state of being. Her internal unrest is emotional, mental, and physical. The narrator vivifies her physiological experience using diction like “battling,” “furious,” “slippery,” “wavering,” and “unreliable.” This vocabulary evokes notions of combat and inconsistency. The passage thus introduces Lila’s journey toward Healing, Reconciliation, and Personal Growth as she learns to reconcile with life’s changes.

“She doesn’t talk about this little fantasy, not since she’d blurted it out to Eleanor one morning and Eleanor had stopped in her tracks and asked, Are you okay? But she keeps watching, willing Estella to do wilder and more terrible things, even as she sits in her tracksuit bottoms, with dog hair all over them, her hair pulled back in a scrunchie.”

Lila’s telenovela provides insight into her emotional state. Lila identifies with the main character and melodramatic storyline because it validates her own relationship troubles. She imagines Estella doing “wilder and more terrible things” because she feels powerless in her own life. She is thus living vicariously through Estella. Meanwhile, the descriptions of Lila’s grungy outfit highlight her state of despair and her feeling of helplessness.