William Waters

Much of Hello Beautiful revolves around William Waters, a basketball player at Northwestern University. The novel opens with the stark pronouncement that “for the first six days of William Waters’s life, he was not an only child” (3). William had an older sister, Caroline, who died soon after William’s birth. For much of William’s childhood, his parents are cold, distant, and emotionally unavailable. This sense of disconnection suffuses William’s life; for much of the novel, William is relatively shy, quiet, and withdrawn.

After earning a scholarship to play basketball at Northwestern, William moves from Boston to Chicago, where he meets the outgoing and ambitious Julia Padavano. Julia views William as “moldable” (17) and believes that he fits in with her plans for a respectable, successful life. William becomes close with the Padavanos, realizing that he has found not only a new girlfriend, but a “new...