Age

Anna’s anxiety over her age compared to Pat’s self-driven freedom shows how age is only a limiter if one allows it to be.

All throughout the novel, Anna references her age and laments that she has lost so many years of her life without certain experiences. While this applies to many things, including her relationship with Tom, Anna often tries to convince herself that she is living life to the fullest. Before going to Turtle Island, she writes, “I was no stranger to loneliness, but over the past few years I’d polished my strategies to deal with it. I would remind myself that the flip side of loneliness could be worse – a houseful of demanding kids, a husband who expected dinner on the table, a weighty mortgage, irritating in-laws it became almost a game to see what new horrors I could come up...