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Summary: The Successful Life
Nora wakes up in a hotel room. She sees on an itinerary that she is giving a speech at a conference on inspiring success. When Nora sees herself in the mirror, she is pleasantly surprised that she is in pique physical form. She does some exercises and delights herself with how easy they are. She feels stronger than she ever has. She looks herself up on Wikipedia and finds that she has made it to the Olympics twice and has won multiple medals. She has even set a world record for the fastest freestyle swim, has retired at a young age, and has published a ghostwritten memoir about her successes. Nora watches a video of herself giving a talk about how to succeed in life. She feels like she’s watching an entirely different person and marvels at this Nora’s confidence and poise.
Nora gets a phone call from a woman she doesn’t know named Nadia, asking to plan Nora’s father’s birthday party. Nora is shocked when her father gets on the phone. Her father has remarried after her parents’ divorce, and Nora discovers on Wikipedia that Nadia is the mother of a fellow Olympic swimmer. Nora gets emotional to be talking to her long-dead father and tells him she loves him and feels as though she doesn’t say it enough. She checks in to make sure his health is okay, and it turns out that, in this life, he got fit because he was inspired by Nora’s success and didn’t have a heart attack. Her father wonders if she’s okay because she seems strange, and he alludes to her therapist and a mental health episode.
Shaken by her conversation, Nora goes for a swim. She feels fantastic in her body, but her mood begins to darken as she thinks about her mother, who died many years ago in this life. She’s angry at her father for living a good life when her mother is gone and for treating Nora as though his love is conditional, predicated on her success in swimming. When she goes back to her room to get ready for the day, she feels loneliness emanating from her suitcase.
In the lobby, she’s surprised to see her brother, who is her manager. Nora struggles to answer the basic questions that her brother and the people at the event are asking her. Everyone seems a bit worried that something is wrong with Nora.
Summary: Peppermint Tea
In this life, Nora drinks peppermint tea. Joe brings her some, and Nora asks him if he ever thinks about what his life might have been like if he wasn’t Nora’s manager. She realizes that she is a powerful influence on his life when he tells her he went to university, something he never did in their root life, and that he’s happily married. She asks questions about their mother’s death, and Joe is disturbed at how little Nora seems to remember. Nora learns from Joe that neither of them were there for their mother in her final months, and that her mother started drinking after Nora’s father became involved with Nadia.
Summary: The Tree That Is Our Life
Nora tells Joe she’s having a panic attack and can’t go on stage. He encourages her to push through, and she does. She gives a speech about the tree of life, which encapsulates all the different branching choices that make up a life. She says that in most of her lives she’s not giving this speech to the audience. She says a lot of discussions of success are nonsense. She encourages the audience to just be kind. She tells them she loves them and then she leaves the successful life for the library.
Summary: System Error
In the library, Mrs. Elm is at an old-fashioned computer and the lights in the library are flickering and the screen says there is a system error. Mrs. Elm says something is happening in her external life to affect the library, and that it’s possible Nora is dying. Mrs. Elm fixes the error, though, and things seem to be okay again for the moment. Mrs. Elm reminds Nora that she was once interested in the Arctic, and Nora chooses to try the life in which she’s a glaciologist.
Analysis
This section explores the theme of the illusory nature of success. At first, Nora’s visit to the successful life shows her how good success feels. She is empowered to see that she has accomplished so much in her life as an Olympian swimmer, and it makes her understand that she’s fundamentally capable of more than she knew. She also feels strong in her body, as though she’s healthier than she has ever been, which gives her a sense of personal power. However, this sense of strength wavers as she moves through the day in the life of her successful self. She senses a great loneliness inherent in the life this Nora has built, one that seems to speak to a greater sense of unhappiness. She also experiences a lack of closeness with her family, and it is difficult for her to admit that something is wrong, giving a sense that she is trapped in a performance of a strong, successful person. For example, her brother will not accept that she’s having a panic attack and tells her to pull herself together. What’s more, this Nora has had a mental breakdown, suggesting that despite the appearances of success, she’s internally struggling more than anyone knows.
Throughout their relationship, Nora’s father sees her not as a person outside him but as a reflection of his own failure or success. In the life in which Nora is an Olympian, her father marks her achievement as a measure of his own success, saying that he is happy because he has an Olympian daughter. His entire life path has been changed by Nora’s swimming, but rather than being grateful and loving toward his successful daughter, he continues to be short with her, avoid emotional conversations, and deflect her attempts at closeness. In short, in both her root life and in the life she lived to please him, her father fails to see her for who she is and instead focuses on the success or pride she brings him, suggesting that his love is predicated on her following his will. In both her root life, where she is consumed with regret about letting her father down, and in her successful life, where she has made most of her life choices to please him, Nora still feels that her father fails to unconditionally love her.
This section also explores the slippery nature of happiness. In many of the lives Nora visits, she finds evidence that each Nora experiences some degree of depression and grief. Though the Nora in Australia and Nora the Olympian have two vastly different life experiences, both suffer from mental health issues that impact their abilities to connect and feel alive. That Nora the Olympian has had a breakdown suggests that “success,” as defined by conventional wisdom, does not automatically lead to happiness. What’s more, grief, which Nora in Australia is trapped in, is a constant that Nora cannot escape from, and in nearly every life she visits, she grapples with the loss of a loved one or the loss of herself. When Nora wonders if she has the capacity to be happy, Mrs. Elm questions whether happiness is the goal of life. Nora’s experience suggests that happiness itself is not a condition of one’s life but an often-fleeting experience.
