The Past

Throughout the novel, the author uses her main character and first person narrator Lola’s involvement in Clive’s experiment to explore the entrapping nature of the past. The author introduces this notion in the opening chapter of the novel when Lola runs into her ex Amos. When she returns home from her evening with Amos, she decides not to relay the encounter to Boots because she believes that “The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them” (39). Lola, therefore, has not let go of her past. Rather, she has chosen to bury it. The author symbolizes this habit of compartmentalizing the past via Lola’s hidden shoebox of dating-related memorabilia. The box represents Lola’s fear that her “former love life was a bomb waiting to...