Marianne

Marianne is the protagonist of the novel. She grew up in a rural Welsh village with her mother, father, and younger brother, Joe. Her mother left her and Joe when they were barely old enough to remember her, and Marianne works through the trauma of being abandoned as the novel unfolds.

After her mother left, Marianne expended all of her energy trying to find her mother and understand why she was left behind. Marianne struggled to parse out the truth from her imagination from the whimsical stories her mother used to tell her to explain the world. Being abandoned left a deep-seated fear of not being good enough to be loved as she was by another person. When she met Emily as a teenager, Marianne allowed herself to be devalued and mistreated by her. She felt bad about sharing her body with Emily and being intimate together without...