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Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She's accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen's adoptive brother is dead. According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother's few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.… (more)
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Ultimately, Helen wonders why she is alive while her stepbrother is not. They shared much. Both were Korean and adopted. Both were outsiders and isolated from their predominantly white suburban neighborhood. Both found few models that included them. And both made the shocking admission that, as children, they prayed at night that they would wake up white. Yet they took different paths in their efforts at reconciliation. Helen left home and remained estranged from her stepparents and Milwaukee. She came to realize that “There is a world and history of nonwhite culture.” Meanwhile, her stepbrother remained at home with few friends spending most of his time alone. His final reconciliation attempt fails horribly when he discovers his birth mother in Seoul, but fails to follow through with a planned meeting. Helen muses about their different outcomes, but doesn’t seem to have the maturity to understand them. “I didn’t kill myself for some reason or another. Inside me was a force that wanted to stay alive.”
In her struggle to understand herself, Helen is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Despite being 32 and college educated, she seems naïve, lacks self-awareness, and is stubbornly obtuse about too much. She persists in maintaining distance from her family by continually referring to them as “adoptive.” And her quixotic investigation into her stepbrother’s suicidal motivations is meandering and lacking focus or direction.
Ultimately, Cottrell gives us an interesting, complex, and deeply flawed protagonist who views her life through a darkly humorous lens. Although Helen has an intriguing and distinctive voice, her self-absorption and tendency to drift can be disconcerting and frustrating. One can’t help but wish her well, but ultimately know that this is probably not to be. Her failure to make it to her stepbrother’s memorial service, despite the best of intentions at turning over a new leaf, only serves to emphasize her confusion and failure at self-discovery. She sits there and sadly wonders, “How do we live with ourselves? There must be a way, but no one has ever told me.”