Content Warning: This section includes discussions of drug abuse and death by suicide.

In this novel, addiction symbolizes broken childhoods and deep-held insecurities. Frank’s abuse of alcohol, for example, is a manifestation of his struggles with the stresses of his life and his past traumas. His mother had an alcohol addiction, and their link haunts and influences him. Initially, Frank fights with the idea that he has a problem. In denying his addiction, he denies the unresolved traumas of his childhood and the challenge of sustaining a successful adult life.

Cleo’s depression is similarly symbolic of larger conflicts. Cleo is haunted by her mother’s death by suicide and was forced to deal with the world without her. Cleo struggles with the reality that she, like her mother, can die from suicide. She folds into the loneliness of being motherless and alone in the world. Cleo believes she doesn’t always need to medicate her depression, highlighting that she doesn’t want it to be a problem. She wants to distance herself from it so she can put space between herself and her mother’s death. However, like her depression, her mother’s death will always be with her; it must be confronted, acknowledged, and managed rather than repressed or denied.