Life and Death

Over the course of We All Want Impossible Things, the author uses Ash’s struggle to reconcile with her best friend’s terminal illness in order to consider the interconnection between life and death. When Edi first goes into hospice care at the Graceful Shepherd Hospice, Shapely estimates “that Edi [will] be their guest for just a week or two” (8, Newman’s italics). However, when Edi’s stay stretches on longer than expected, Ash is forced into an interstice between life and death. The author imagistically represents this interstitial space by way of the two primary narrative settings. Ash indeed spends the entirety of the novel moving back and forth between her home and the hospice. While her house represents life and the hospice represents death, these spheres gradually begin to bleed into and inflect one another.

The same can be said of Ash...