Memory and the Past

Over the course of the novel, the author uses her inventive narrative structure in order to formally enact her thematic explorations concerning memory and the past. Rather than setting Tom Lake either in the present or in the past, the author allows Lara’s first person narrative to toggle between these two competing temporal realms from Chapters 1 - 21. Years after learning that their mother once acted with and dated the handsome and famous Peter Duke, her three grown daughters beg for Lara to recount the details. Therefore, in the narrative present, Lara finds herself delving into and retracing the events of her life from high school through the late 1990s.

From the novel’s beginning to its end, Lara finds herself in the act of remembering not only what she experienced throughout the decades prior, but who she has been. For Lara’s...