The Mother

The Mother is the protagonist and point-of-view character of the story. She is referred to in the story only as ‘the Mother.’ She is a professional fiction writer and appears to be based in part on the author, Lorrie Moore. Moore has stated in interviews that this story is partially inspired by her own experiences involving a medical diagnosis of her own son. The Mother is highly distraught when her son is diagnosed with cancer, but she perseveres through her son’s medical treatment. She finds the often strange, impersonal optimism of the medical staff to be generally grating and unhelpful.

The Mother’s husband advises her to use the experiences of this ordeal to write a story, but the Mother finds it very difficult to derive any type of sense of redemption in the chaos and seeming randomness of the ordeal. However, the end of the...