Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, emotional abuse, and death by suicide.

Grady Green is the protagonist and predominant first-person narrator of the novel. Grady’s narration dictates the narrative’s overarching conflicts, stakes, atmosphere, and mood. From Grady’s point of view, his life changed the night his wife Abby Goldman disappeared. He holds that Abby “was [his] person. She was [his] everything and when you lose your everything there simply is nothing left” (41-42). At the novel’s start, Grady presents himself as a sympathetic character who’s reeling from grief after losing his wife in an unexplained tragedy. Suddenly unable to eat, sleep, or write, Grady feels unmoored from reality. He accepts his agent Kitty Goldman’s offer to stay in the late author Charles Whittaker’s Isle of Amberly writing cabin in hopes of reconnecting with his work, his life, and himself.

Grady is a static character whose self-involvement and delusion preclude him from changing. Over the course of the novel, he also proves to be an unreliable narrator—a

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