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Summary: A Pearl in the Shell
Nora wakes in her bed, feeling very tired. There’s a man next to her and she’s not sure if it’s Ash or not. She gets up and encounters her daughter in this life. The child has had a nightmare about bears. Nora is full of emotion, both conflicted about pretending to be the girl’s mother and drawn to comfort her. The girl takes her hand and leads her into her bedroom. The girl asks Nora what happens when people die. She says no one knows for sure. She says that when she’s afraid about things like the future, things that are full of unknowns, it’s good to think about what the girl does know. They agree to play a game.
Summary: The Game
Nora has the girl, Molly, play a game in which she answers questions she already knows the answer to. She says this game is to make Molly feel better. She learns from Molly that, in this life, she’s married to Ash and she teaches philosophy at the university. She’s taking time off from teaching to write a book. Ash and Nora get along. Joe is still alive and partnered, and Joe and Nora talk on the phone often. They have a dog named Pluto. Molly and Nora fall asleep, and in the morning, Nora wakes up just before Ash comes to the room.
Summary: The Perfect Life
Ash and Nora have a pleasant interaction, in which he seems kind and happy. When he takes Molly to school, Nora is left alone in the house to study this version of her life. She looks through her emails and ascertains that she’s on sabbatical from teaching to write a book about Thoreau and the modern environmentalist movement. She enjoys that she gets to read and think about her favorite philosopher all day. She looks in the mirror and sees that she looks pleasant. She decides that this is a good life.
Summary: A Spiritual Quest for a Deeper Connection with the Universe
Nora enjoys this life and thinks often about how good it is. She struggles to fit in entirely, often forgetting the basic information and preferences that make up a life, such as how to get places, what movies she’s seen, and the date of her anniversary. Ash notices and confronts her, and Nora blames her forgetfulness on her involvement in her research. She also sometimes feels depression, but it’s slight, especially compared to the existential dread she feels in her root life. Given how good this life is, she wonders why she hasn’t forgotten her root life and fully committed to this life.
Nora and Ash have sex for the first time since she slid into this life. After, she asks him if he believes in parallel universes, and he says he does. She says that she’s been to other lives and that in another life they had together, he helps her bury her cat. He brushes it off as an idiosyncrasy, and Nora reflects that no matter how honest she is, people will see her through the lens of who they already think she is.
Summary: Hammersmith
Nora, Ash, and Molly go to visit Joe and his husband in Hammersmith. They have a nice Italian meal. Nora asks Joe if he’s still sore at her about quitting the band. He says no and apologizes for treating her poorly for years, and also for misunderstanding how difficult panic attacks are. She tells him she thinks he’s happier in this life than in the life where he became a rockstar.
Summary: Tricycle
Nora begins to have memories from her life in Cambridge from before she slid there. Her errors and forgetfulness become less frequent, and she adapts more fully to the life. One day, Molly falls off her tricycle and hits her head on a small rock. Nora comforts her and feels overwhelmed with love. She realizes that love is what is missing from her root life. She feels so attached to this life but also feels a sense of wrongness because she didn’t earn it. She decides to go to Bedford.
Summary: No Longer Here
She goes to Bedford to visit Mrs. Elm and finds out that Mrs. Elm died peacefully in her sleep three weeks ago. She also runs into Mr. Banerjee, who, in this life, is in the same residential care facility that Mrs. Elm was in before she died.
Summary: An Incident with the Police
Walking in her old neighborhood in Bedford, Nora realizes that she is the only difference in Mr. Banerjee’s life, meaning her small act of bringing him pills made a difference between him being in a care facility and him remaining in his cherished home. She also sees Leo, her piano student, being arrested, and the police tell her he’s constantly in trouble. She reflects that the smallest things she did in her life had a big influence on other people’s lives. She begins to feel deeply strange and reminds herself that this is a good life.
Summary: A New Way of Seeing
Nora passes String Theory and sees, as in her life with Dylan, that it closed earlier than it had when she had worked there. She reflects on her impact of her root life. She reminds herself again that this is the best life she’s experienced. But she instinctually knows she’s going to go back to the library soon.
Summary: The Flowers Have Water
Nora goes home to be with Molly and Ash. She tells Molly she loves her and her dad. There’s nothing she can do to stop herself from going back to the library.
Analysis
The teachings of Thoreau frame Nora’s understanding of the nature of reality and the meaning of life. In Nora’s most successful life yet, she gets to spend her time studying her favorite philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. As illustrated throughout the novel, Thoreau believed in the power of self-reliance, in the single-minded pursuit of one’s dreams, and in the interconnectedness and goodness of people. All of these themes come to a head in the end of Nora’s journey. She learns the beauty and peace of quiet study and being alone with her thoughts, and on a larger level, she learns to look inward to find what she truly wants rather than being led by the expectations of others. This self-reliance helps her understand more clearly that she wants the good life with Ash and Molly, and her self-understanding provides insight into what she needs to feel content. She sees that Ash’s kindness and Nora’s love for Molly are what make life worth living, and she takes this belief in the inherent goodness of people back into her root life.
This section explores the power of small things to impact people’s lives in large ways. When Nora visits the neighborhood of her root life, she begins to understand the impact she has on the world around her. Though she has been concerned about the pain she has caused those she loves and has fixated on the things she regrets, here she sees firsthand that she also brings good to other people’s lives. She sees that without her, Mr. Banerjee would be in a residential home instead of living out the last years of his life in his home with his garden. She also sees that without the simple act of teaching Leo to play piano, Leo would turn to crime, unconvinced he has anything of value to offer the world. Though Nora loves the life with Ash, she realizes that this good life isn’t hers, in part because she wasn’t there for the intervening years since the coffee date and therefore hasn’t earned the life. But she also realizes that the good life is possible in her root life because her simple acts of kindness have had profound effects on the lives of those around her.
This section also explores the theme of the power of love to create meaning in life. Nora has traveled through hundreds of iterations of her life. She has experienced the heights and depths, and she has known both deep despair and wild success. But each life left her feeling like she wanted more and that something was missing. As soon as she meets Molly, Nora begins to feel a profound sense of connection, which drives her to be more invested in her life there. Her love for Molly also comes with an accompanying sense of fear, which drives home the realization that for the first time in all her travels, Nora may have something she could really lose. This sense of investment, love, and commitment creates meaning and contentment for Nora in her life with Ash, and she begins to truly settle in. However, paradoxically, it’s her feelings of love—for Ash, Molly, and for the Nora whose life it is—that make it impossible for Nora to stay, feeling how wrong it is to take the place of the woman who belongs there. Instead, Nora takes the lessons she’s learned back to her root life and attempts to create a life built on love and kindness.
