Entrapment and Freedom

The narrator’s feeling of entrapment in her home life compels her to take action to liberate herself.

At the start of the novel, the narrator experiences a “funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting” (4). Her arrangement with her husband Harris and child Sam in their Los Angeles home is nominally sustainable, but it does not allow the narrator to be herself. The one time a week she feels engaged in reality is when she visits her best friend Jordi at her studio. Therefore, when she sets out on her cross-country trip to New York, she hopes that she will change and achieve a new, more liberated way of being. She ends up staying at the Excelsior motel just 30 minutes away from home for the next two weeks, where she fabricates her own autonomous realm for...