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I. The 2019 Frame: The Nature of Obsession
The novel’s narrative begins in the present day (around August 2019), centered on the birthday of the protagonist and narrator, Ruth. As she blows out her candles in a small town in upstate New York, she is struck by a sudden, jarring epiphany: “without an obsession life was impossible to live”. This realization is inextricably linked to her lifelong friend and fixation, Maria, who is conspicuously absent from the party. This absence serves as the catalyst for Ruth to recount the long, winding history of their relationship, spanning two decades and several states.
At the party, Ruth seeks comfort in her old professor, Moser, a painter who has transitioned to making small collages due to a permanent tremor. Their conversation turns to family estrangement. Moser reveals his deep-seated bitterness toward his 92-year-old mother, whom he characterizes as a “remorseless abuser”. Ruth finds this level of long-term resentment “frivolous and cruel,” reflecting on her own inability to emancipate herself from her parents’ influence. Her mother had called earlier that morning to express pride in Ruth “anyway,” despite Ruth not having a “real job” and still “just painting”. This frame establishes the book’s central themes: the inescapable gravity of childhood, the performance of happiness, and the blurred lines between love and subjection.
II. Roots of Displacement: Pawtucket and the Uniform Shop
The story of Ruth and Maria begins in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in late August during their childhood. Ruth first sees Maria at a uniform shop on Pawtucket Avenue. Maria is standing with her mother, a frail, light-skinned woman who is begging the shopkeeper to let her take the school uniforms on credit until her disability check arrives. The shopkeeper publicly humiliates and casts them out. Ruth’s mother, a woman who values “minding one’s business” and meticulous presentation above all else, tells Ruth not to look. Despite this, Ruth is transfixed by Maria’s “wide black eyes” and “tremendous confidence” even in the face of poverty.
Ruth’s own upbringing is defined by a “cloistered existence” as an only child in a small apartment located between an Irish cemetery and a factory. Her parents are Kenyan immigrants; her father is “mercurial” and “romantic,” while her mother is a quiet, “funereal” presence who “absorbs great quantities of information to kill and memorialize inside herself”. A formative trauma in Ruth’s life is her mother’s claim that Ruth had a twin in the womb whom she “ate alive” before birth. This story leaves Ruth with a sense of “greedy, careless” original sin that she feels must be atoned for through obedience.
III. Education and Inculcation: Our Lady of the Holy Cross
Ruth and Maria both attend Our Lady of the Holy Cross, a K–12 Catholic school for girls. The tuition is low, funded largely by scholarships from the Diocese, and the curriculum is defined by “atavistic tendencies” and a cynical worldview. Sister Paulette, their teacher, emphasizes order and neatness as being “delightful to our Father”.
A pivotal moment occurs during a school mass where a weary-looking priest delivers a homily on the “restoration” of virginity. He tells the young girls that if they “violate their honor” through sexual transgressions, they can pray to God to “restore your beautiful, physical purity”. This concept of “restoration” becomes a recurring motif in Ruth’s life, representing a desire to erase the “sin” of her past and return to an idealized state of innocence.
During recess, Ruth observes Maria’s quiet rebellions. Maria vandalizes a library copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, drawing horns on the people and blood spilling from the rabbits. When Ruth questions her, Maria throws the book in the trash a book Ruth later retrieves and keeps as a relic of their meeting. Maria also shows Ruth a pair of pearl earrings, a gift from the music teacher, Mr. Fournier, which hints at a complex and potentially inappropriate relationship between the two.
IV. The Geography of Grief: Suicides and Secret Histories
As their friendship deepens, the girls’ shared morbidity becomes a bonding agent. Maria reveals that her mother committed suicide. She lives with her aunt, Jocelyn, who suffers from severe bipolar disorder and paranoia. Ruth’s own family history contains a similar shadow: during a trip to Nairobi, Kenya, Ruth’s mother reveals that her own mother drowned while on holiday. Later, she adds that her brother’s wife also committed suicide by hanging herself.
Ruth’s trip to Kenya is a “dry and hypnotic” experience that leaves her feeling like a “tourist in a hotel room”. She feels more homesick for Maria and the Pawtucket laundromat than for her ancestral home. Upon returning, Ruth tells Maria about her aunt’s hanging, and Maria responds with an elated “I knew it!”. This shared language of tragedy binds them together, with Maria becoming the “epicenter” of Ruth’s world.
V. Adolescence and the Rise of Mr. Fournier
In middle and high school, Maria’s talent for singing makes her the clear favorite of Mr. Fournier. He is a temperamental, “pedantic” man who creates a “strange salon” at his condo for his favorite female students. Ruth, who works in the wardrobe department just to be near Maria, views him with suspicion, while Maria sees him as a “brilliant, misunderstood artist” who understands her “unmoored” status.
A crisis occurs in late November when Maria disappears during a blizzard. Ruth and her mother drive through the storm in a “fruitless” search, fearing she has been abducted. Ruth spends the night transmuting her pain into a “MISSING” poster sketch of Maria, which her mother finds “vulgar” and “reviling”. In the morning, Maria is found with Mr. Fournier. Maria claims she was trying to take a bus to New York to find her father and called Fournier when the buses were canceled. Though Ruth’s mother threatens to call the police, Fournier is never fired, and rehearsals for the school’s nativity play resume as if nothing happened.
VI. University and the James Era: Theft and Pretense
Both girls receive scholarships to Bard College in Annandale, New York. The transition is jarring; the ” navy and white uniforms” are replaced by “transgressive” secondhand clothes and a culture where “expressing oneself is paramount”. Ruth begins to study studio art, while Maria focuses on film and projection.
Ruth enters into her first relationship with James, a Black British student who is “notoriously rude” and talented. James is a Marxist who dresses Ruth down during critiques, calling her paintings of twins “whitewashed” and “undeveloped”. Despite his arrogance, Ruth is drawn to him. Their relationship is characterized by “long marathons of eating nonperishable foods” and listening to him read “dense Marxist tomes”.
However, James is fundamentally unreliable. During the winter break, when Ruth is working as an assistant in Professor Moser’s studio, she discovers that seven hundred dollars her entire stipend is missing from her dresser. James disappears that same night, sending a dramatic email claiming he had made an attempt on his life and was returning to London to “resume therapy”. Maria is the first to point out the obvious: “Someone stole it… James”.
VII. The Waterfall and the Secret of Restoration
In the wake of James’s departure, the relationship between Ruth and Maria reaches a physical climax. After a night of drinking, they go swimming at a waterfall on campus. There, they touch and kiss, an act Ruth feels is an “inevitable progression” of their childhood bond. However, the encounter is interrupted by a “terrible pain” in Ruth’s stomach and a “stream of blood” down her leg.
At the campus clinic, a nurse informs Ruth that she is pregnant. Maria immediately takes charge, deciding that Ruth will get an abortion. Because Ruth is broke following James’s theft, Maria secures the money from her girlfriend, Sheila, a wealthy and “peacemaking” student from Los Angeles. Ruth undergoes the procedure at a clinic in town, walking through protestors who tell her she will “burn in hell”. She views the ultrasound not as a picture of life, but as a “bluish-gray” painting that has “nothing to do with me”.
VIII. New York City: The Domestic Trap
After graduation, Ruth, Maria, and Sheila move to New York City, sharing a loft in Soho owned by Sheila’s family. Sheila is the “patron” of the group, paying for Maria’s film development and providing Ruth with a place to live. Ruth works as a hostess in an Italian restaurant and later as an assistant to a high-strung painter named Emily, who writes “manifestos” on her studio walls and is addicted to Adderall.
Ruth’s life in the city is a “fugue state” of loneliness and jealousy. She watches Maria’s career take off, fueled by Sheila’s connections and “blackmail” schemes against exploitative gallerists. Maria becomes an “it girl” in the art world, while Ruth remains a “minor figure” making “unambitious paintings” of unnamed Black subjects.
During this period, Ruth meets Ed, a writer who is “fundamentally conservative” and “risk-averse”. Ed provides Ruth with the stability she craves, eventually offering her a small “closet” in his apartment to use as a studio. Ruth accepts his proposal of marriage in a dim movie theater, feeling she has “no choice but to say yes” to his “goodwill and generosity”.
IX. The Dinner and the Disclosures
A turning point occurs during a lunch between Ruth and Maria just before Ruth and Ed move upstate for Ruth’s new teaching fellowship. Maria, who is now “dressing like a man” and has achieved significant fame, reveals two major secrets.
First, she tells Ruth that her aunt Jocelyn is dead. Second, and more devastatingly, she confesses that when they first moved to New York, she had intercepted several letters from James. The letters contained “long, weird apologies,” a confession of the theft, and a plea for Ruth to start anew with him. Maria admit she “read them… then months passed, and I threw them out”. She justifies this by saying she was “looking out for you,” but Ruth realizes Maria likely acted out of jealousy.
X. The Failed Escape and the Chain
Following the lunch, Maria calls Ruth’s apartment while Sheila is out of town, begging to see her. At Maria’s apartment, Maria confesses her love for Ruth, claiming she is leaving Sheila and wants to run away with Ruth. She tells Ruth to “go home and pack your things”.
Ruth, swept up in the “uncontrollable impulse” of her obsession, returns home and begins packing a bag to desert her marriage. She tells Ed “leave me” when he threatens to end the relationship if she goes out again. She meets Maria at a hotel, where they spend the night together. In the morning, they agree to go home, “straighten up,” and meet back at the hotel to leave for good.
However, Maria never returns. Ruth waits in the hotel room for hours, leaving “increasingly frantic messages” on Maria’s voicemail. She eventually realizes that Maria has abandoned her once again. When Ruth returns to her apartment, she finds Ed has fastened the chain lock on the door. In a desperate, “unregretful” display of submission, Ruth kneels in the hallway and begs for his forgiveness, calling herself “lazy” and “persecuted”. Ed eventually opens the door.
XI. Restoration and the Final Call
The novel concludes after Ruth and Ed have moved to a house in Tivoli, New York. Ruth has achieved the professional success she once envied in Maria: she is a full-time professor at Bard and her paintings sell for “good money”. Ed has become sober and is finally writing his “forthcoming novel”.
Despite this “marital bliss,” Ruth remains “out of breath” and haunted by Maria. She learns through a magazine that Maria and Sheila are now married. When Ruth tries to call, Sheila answers and tells her, “Don’t call me or my wife anymore,” revealing that Maria told Sheila that Ruth “asked her to leave me”.
In the final scene, Ruth is walking home from her car, which has broken down on the highway. She stops at a German pub and drinks until she is “pissed,” confessing her “terrible regret” to a tattooed stranger. When she finally reaches home, Ed is sitting at the kitchen table holding the phone with the “careful look a person has just before they break terrible news”. Ruth vomits “notes of bourbon, sour mix” the exact drink Maria had ordered at the diner. The book ends on the final, ominous sentence: “Then I knew it was Maria”. This concludes the cycle of obsession, implying that the news on the phone is the final, tragic resolution of Maria’s “unmoored” life.
