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Summary
Chapter 5
Lara describes the sameness of life during the pandemic lockdowns. Nell and Maisie take classes from home; Maisie can do veterinary work with local people, but Nell is stuck reading plays alone. When Lara picks her story back up, she explains that her movie took more than three years to release after they filmed it. Bill Ripley discourages her from taking acting classes, which he worries will ruin her innocent façade. He suggested she audition for a Broadway production of Our Town with the famous actor Spalding Gray. She doesn’t get the part, mostly because she isn’t well-known enough to pull an audience. Lara suspected Charlie (the man on the audition panel who tells her this) might want her to trade sex for the part, but instead, he recommends she try out for a summer production at a Michigan company called Tom Lake. They needed someone to replace the role of Emily in a summer stock production of Our Town. When the narrative returns to 2020, Nell asks Lara if she really would have slept with Charlie to get the part. Lara tells her that she would have gone scrambling out of the restaurant if he’d tried. Nell cries, and Lara, helpless, wishes she could promise Nell a life free from harm and gendered bias, though she knows she can't.
Chapter 6
It’s the 80s and Lara arrives at Traverse City, Michigan, to play Emily in Our Town. Eric, the man in charge of Tom Lake, explains that the sudden absence of their own Emily has been a nightmare. This is compounded by the lead actor Albert Long’s losing battle with alcoholism. Lara agrees to commit to joining the company, which means being in productions of both Our Town and, later, Fool for Love. While she settles into her modest room in Michigan, she muses on how all of her friends from home are married by now. Peter Duke, a fellow cast-member in Our Town, comes to her room to introduce himself. He tells her an obviously fictional story about how Tom Lake got its name. The story, as Lara soon realizes, is total nonsense, but Duke is a very convincing liar and storyteller. Duke reveals he’ll be playing Emily’s father, Editor Webb, in Our Town. Back in the present, Lara reflects on her feelings about Duke. She doesn’t dwell much on his fame, because she feels like the famous Peter Duke isn’t the man she knew. Instead, she chews over the intense draw she felt to the handsome man she met that day and fell head-over-heels in love with. Maisie asks her how she could ever have gotten over her love for him. Lara explains that loving Duke was like going on a rollercoaster or a carnival ride: thrilling at first, but not something anyone wants to experience for their whole life.
Chapter 7
The family assemble for dinner after a day of picking, and Nell asks Joe what he thought of Peter Duke. Joe replies evenly that Duke was talented and well-liked, as was his brother Sebastian. Lara resumes her story, describing the table read for Our Town. When the cast sit down to read together, Peter introduces her to the other actors. The only famous person there is Albert Long, who had a long-running role on television before coming to Michigan. Mr. Nelson, the director of Our Town, leads the actors in reading the play, which makes Lara realize that she’s far older than she was when she first played Emily. Although she doesn’t think she’s right for the part anymore, Nelson is pleased with her casting. In 2020, Maisie leaves to treat a neighbor’s sick calf. Lara curls up with Hazel, the dog, and tells her that she’s always believed her career fell apart because she wasn’t talented, not because of a lack of bravery. She tells Hazel that on that first day, Duke showed her around the theater and the nearby area, kissed her, asked her to start smoking with him, and then took her to his bedroom. Back in 2020, noting that they’re alone–for once—Joe and Lara head upstairs to have sex.
Analysis: Chapters 5-7
In these chapters, we see Lara’s past life colliding with her present role as a mother. It points to an idea that’s important throughout the novel: it’s impossible for children to fully know their parents. As Lara recounts her story to her daughters, there are moments where she carefully curates her narrative without admitting it, revealing certain aspects while withholding others. Her daughters see her as the steady, responsible figure who raised them, and she doesn’t want to interrupt that image. Even though she gives her daughters parts of her story, the more uncomfortable details of her past remain largely hidden.
Read more about the novel’s theme of the Uneven Rewards of Parenthood.
When Lara talks about Ripley discouraging her from taking acting classes to preserve her “unspoiledness,” it becomes clear that as a young woman she found it difficult to advocate for herself. She was lucky that her decision to be herself on stage was what Ripley was looking for, but this eventually backfires. Ripley takes on a protective but strict role, almost paternal in nature, guiding her decisions and stopping her from doing things he doesn’t like. This guidance allows Lara’s passivity to come to the fore; she allows her life to be directed by those around her. This is first the case with Ripley and later with Duke. Lara has been raised to respect authority and her circumstances have shown her that these men have authority over her. This part of the story doesn’t resonate as well as the rest with her daughters, who are surprised by the lack of agency Lara showed. They’re used to her being authoritative and self-assured. They feel they don’t know this younger version of their mother as well as they might have guessed.
Nell’s shock at the revelation that Lara auditioned for a Broadway show alongside the famous Spalding Gray also underscores how little the daughters truly know about their mother’s past. To them, Lara’s life has always been tied to the farm, with some vague knowledge that she was an actress and the standout fact of her having dated Peter Duke. This revelation forces them to confront the idea that their mother once moved in circles far removed from their current reality, ones that Nell herself can barely imagine entering. When she mentions the moment of vulnerability she feels in the bar when Charlie tells her why she wasn’t cast, Lara tries to dismiss it. All of her daughters, but especially Nell, can’t help but fixate on the implications of that moment. Moments like these in the story make them aware of how young and vulnerable Lara was duringthe time she describes. Indeed, Lara’s admission that she likely would have run away if Charlie had propositioned her shows a real distance between the younger Lara and her current self. In her youth, she felt more uncertain, more willing to be swept along by circumstances and people’s expectations. This is very different to her present role as a mother, where she is responsible for guiding Emily, Maisie, and Nell as they grow up and face difficult decisions
As the story shifts back to Lara’s arrival at Tom Lake, Duke’s entrance into her life further complicates the picture. The fictional story Peter tells about Tom Lake when he first speaks to Lara sets the stage for their relationship—he’s charming and absolutely captivating, so much so that Lara almost ignores the outlandishness of the tall tale he’s telling her. She describes their first meeting as being like a fairy story, where Duke wove a spell around her and she stood there bedazzled. However, the feelings she has for Duke at this point don’t have anything to do with his later fame. She tries to explain to her daughters that she fell for him as Peter. At this point Peter Duke was not Peter Duke the famous actor, just a beautiful, vulnerable man who walked into her room that summer day. However, she knows that her daughters can’t imagine this, as they’ve only known him as a celebrity. Even as she recounts this part, it’s clear she too has distanced herself from how the situation really felt. Instead of diving into her giddy infatuation, she works on presenting a more measured version of events to the listening girls. The carnival metaphor she uses to describe how she got over Duke reinforces the distance between Lara and this version of her story. She was able to get over her love for Duke because being with him, which once seemed exhilarating and thrilling, eventually lost its appeal. Having experienced the stomach-lurching intensity of that love, she had no wish to feel it again.
Read an explanation of a quote (#3) about Lara’s daughters’ fascination with Peter Duke.
