payment page
The Last Thing He Told Me is a thriller that questions whether people can ever truly know anyone. The novel is a first-person, present tense narrative about Hannah’s efforts to find her husband and understand his actions. The present-day narrative about Hannah and Bailey’s investigation into Owen’s past is juxtaposed against past tense flashbacks, also from Hannah’s point of view, about her relationship with Owen. These flashbacks take on new meanings as Hannah gathers information. The flashback chapters largely operate in reverse chronology, taking readers further back in time as the action of the plot moves forward. Through this narrative structure, author Laura Dave depicts how the characters construct meaning from their memories and how memory informs their present-day choices. Hannah struggles throughout the book to reconcile her idea of who she thinks her husband is with the man he seems to be in the wake of his disappearance. Simultaneously, she also attempts to mend her relationship with Bailey while guiding her through the trauma of her father’s disappearance. Both women struggle with various crises of self, wrestling with how Owen being someone other than Owen affects them.
The novel’s main antagonist, Owen’s former father-in-law and Bailey’s grandfather, Nicholas Bell appears late in the action. Dave subverts reader expectations, though, by having Hannah form an alliance with this chief antagonist in the end. In a more conventional thriller, Hannah would have to defeat Nicholas to protect herself and her stepdaughter. However, by framing Nicholas as someone with whom Hannah must work, Dave dispels the rigid narrative binary of villains versus heroes. Other characters also present obstacles the protagonists must navigate, including US Marshal Grady and Hannah’s former fiancé, Jake, who both question Hannah’s choices. At times, Owen also functions as an antagonist, given his deceit and the situation in which he leaves the women. Several minor characters present impediments to the main characters, and Hannah and especially Bailey experience these people as antagonists (particularly Elenor), even though many of them end up being helpful. Hannah admits that much of this perception and treatment stems from misplaced anger redirected at the most convenient target. With all these secondary quasi-antagonists, Dave again demonstrates that reducing characters to either simple heroes or simple villains is too reductive.
The central conflict at the heart of the story hinges on each character’s differing definition of protection. Virtually every character wants to protect Bailey from harm, but they seldom agree on what her safety entails. For Owen and Hannah, Bailey’s safety encompasses her emotional security as well as physical protection. For law enforcement characters and other bystanders, though, physical safety is the primary concern. Many people harshly judge Owen’s decision to disappear, but for a man who considers his identity as a father his defining characteristic, such social scorn is a small price to pay. Throughout the book, Hannah strives to honor Owen’s request to protect Bailey without even knowing what precisely she is protecting the young woman from. Readers may sometimes question whether Hannah’s seemingly reckless actions protect Bailey or put her at risk, though Hannah’s decision seems the only solution that protects her stepdaughter while allowing her to maintain her identity. In the will he hides in the piggy bank, Owen seems to recognize how complicated the issue of safety is, listing numerous options for how to manage specific situations, while still signaling his trust in Hannah’s ability to keep Bailey safe by naming her legal guardian.
Due to the complicated and murky circumstances in which Hannah finds herself, negotiation proves her most useful tool in determining what happens to Owen and securing her own safety. Negotiation even forms a key component of Owen and Hannah’s relationship from the start, with the two flirtatiously discussing their no-dating rules. Ultimately, they agree to a compromise, a first date that is not technically a date. Before Owen’s disappearance but after their marriage, Hannah realizes that her relationship with Bailey relies on an elaborate balance of give and take. Hannah cannot push too hard for a connection, so she tries to respect Bailey’s boundaries and autonomy. However, she still wants to make an effort to improve relations with her stepdaughter and attempts occasional grand gestures, like cooking Bailey a gourmet dinner like the one she had enjoyed at a restaurant. As she tracks down Owen’s past, Hannah frequently finds herself negotiating between the Austin locals they encounter and a hostile Bailey. The notion of negotiation as an integral part of their family experience foreshadows the painful bargain that Hannah must strike with Nicholas at the end of the novel to secure Bailey’s safety.
In the novel’s climax, the key point of action, when Hannah and Nicholas agree to a compromise to protect Bailey, succeeds because of the flexibility Hannah maintains. Throughout the novel, Dave presents a nuanced vision of life in which nothing is truly certain. Characters grapple with the limits of their knowledge, memories, identities, and definitions of family. Hannah can navigate these complications because she learns to recognize life’s limits without allowing her worldview to collapse into a form of existential nihilism. Hannah accepts that she cannot know everything about her husband, that her memories of their life together can have multiple layers, that she can love Owen without him really being Owen, and that the family she wants with her husband must exist without him.
Hannah’s ability to accept these limits sets her apart from Nicholas, who veers between the polar extremes of her position. On one hand, Nicholas subscribes to a rigid view of himself and Owen. In Nicholas’s eyes, Owen is the villain. On the other hand, Nicholas also argues that nobody can know anything, thereby undermining his own stance. If nobody can know anything, he surely cannot know that Owen is bad with the fierce certainty he maintains. Hannah’s more moderate, balanced view presents the nuanced position that she can believe Owen is good while also accepting she cannot know everything about him, including that he may have done immoral things while working with his father-in-law. In keeping with Dave’s destabilization of rigid character binaries, Nicholas finds it within himself to strike a deal with Hannah. Though he remains a complicated, even contradictory, character with a fixed hatred of Owen, he can still compromise, up to a point. The book’s bittersweet ending also reflects Dave’s depiction of the nuanced and complicated reality of this contemporary American family, as Hannah and Bailey move into a shared future while Owen remains alone and trapped in the past, perhaps paying for crimes he might have committed.
