As the central figure of Into the Water, Jules uses both first-person and second-person voice, talking directly to Nel throughout the story. Jules’s relationship with her sister was fraught, starting when Jules was 13 years old and Nel’s boyfriend, Robbie, raped her. Immediately after the rape, Jules went to the Drowning Pool and nearly drowned before Nel saved her. Those events, coupled with losing her mother to breast cancer around the same age and issues with bulimia, have left Jules with considerable emotional trauma as an adult. She dwells on her past, unable to break out of past traumatic moments, until some of what she thought she knew turns out to be false.

Jules grows considerably over the course of the story as she unpacks her relationship with Nel, putting many of her past complaints behind her and seeing what good there was in her sister. She manages to develop a reasonably good relationship with her niece, Lena, making a new family connection she never had, and finding a way to atone for her misplaced hatred of Nel by taking care of Nel’s daughter. Jules realizes that while she thought herself the opposite of her sister, she and Nel actually have a fair amount in common, including their propensity for seeing situations only through the lens of their

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