Content Warning: This guide briefly mentions abortion, drug use, child abuse, and anti-gay bias.

Rachel is the narrator and protagonist of The Rachel Incident. She tells the story as an adult living in the year 2022, but the bulk of the narrative takes place during her final years of college in 2009-2010. She experiences growth and change throughout the novel, maturing from a young woman struggling to find her place in the world to a successful, professional journalist who is married and expecting a child. The novel charts her journey into adulthood as well as the story of her involvement with her best friend, James Devlin, and an older couple, the Harrington-Byrnes. The incident between them is a source of great shame for her, and the narrative is her attempt to confess as well as to reconcile her adult self to her younger self.

Her father owns a dental practice. She grew up in a comfortable, middle-class household, but the 2008 recession devastates her parents’ finances. She is forced to work for the first time and to pay her own school fees. Living with James Devlin and separated from her family, she begins to explore her own ideas about the world, rather than accepting the truths handed down from her parents.