The portal

The portal is the author's term for the internet. While it is not a physical setting, it is often treated as such because the protagonist uses it as a means of escaping real life and her chronic anxieties. As she scrolls through the portal at the beginning of Chapter 1, the narrator describes this effort to withdraw from reality: "She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out" (3). Interestingly, the author never identifies what state or city the protagonist lives in with her husband—it is as though when she is at home, she simply lives in the portal. She has an unhealthy obsession with it and cannot bring herself to lock her phone away. She is addicted to the neverending onslaught of information the portal provides and the validation she receives when one of her posts goes...