42 pages • 1 hour read
We Were Never Here
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Chapters 12-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 12-13 Summary
On a date at a bar, Aaron eagerly asks Emily for details about the trip, but Emily responds vaguely. She explains a small part of the truth, saying that Kristen is upset that she won’t go on the backpacking trip with her. Shortly after this date, she tries therapy for the first time even though her neglectful and unkind parents raised her to believe therapy is for weak people. Avoiding any incriminating details, she tells her therapist, Adrienne, about her complicated feelings about Kristen, saying that Kristen has always been the only person who tells her the truth when she is in a bad relationship, such as her relationship with Ben, or another past boyfriend, Colin.
When Emily later goes to a yoga class with a work friend, Priya, she sees that Kristen commented on one of Priya’s Instagram posts about the class. She begins thinking about how, for the first time, she is glad Kristen lives so far away, as she doesn’t understand why Kristen seems so chipper and unbothered after Chile.
The very next morning, however, Emily’s doorbell rings as she gets ready for work, and she opens her front door to find Kristen standing on her doorstep.
Chapters 14-15 Summary
Shocked, Emily thinks that at least now she will be able to talk to her friend about the shared trauma of Paolo’s death, but Kristen remains as evasive and chipper as she has been on the phone. She says she will be staying with her grandparents, Nana and Bill, who raised her after her parents died in a house fire when she was 12, and that she has returned because her job in Sydney laid her off.
After taking Kristen to brunch with Aaron, Emily drives Kristen to her grandparents’ house. When Emily accompanies Kristen inside, the atmosphere is tense: Kristen doesn’t seem to like her grandparents, and they don’t seem particularly interested in her. This is not a surprise to Emily, who knows of the strained relationship, but it makes her uncomfortable. Nana is concerned at the thought of Emily living alone in Milwaukee with no family nearby and gives Emily her phone number and email as she leaves.
Chapters 16-17 Summary
After a bowling date, Emily and Aaron have sex for the first time. Though Emily is pleased that she was finally able to take this step after struggling with physical intimacy for so long, her happiness is interrupted when she sees she has a text from Kristen, who says that she “needs” Emily. Emily leaves hastily, calling Kristen on the way, but Kristen says she did not mean that Emily had to come over; she just wanted someone to vent to about her grandfather Bill’s rude comments on her job loss. While Emily responds sympathetically, she is frustrated that she left Aaron abruptly for this false alarm.
At a therapy session later that week, Emily confesses to Adrienne that she feels her friendship with Kristen is mismatched, that Kristen takes better care of her than she takes of Kristen. Adrienne explains that some people (perhaps like Kristin) deliberately create just such a dynamic in their relationships as a form of control disguised as caring. Emily hastily responds that she doesn’t think this describes the dynamic between herself and Kristen.
Chapters 12-17 Analysis
While Emily’s therapist, Adrienne, is a minor character, and the reader learns little about her, she serves an important role as a reader surrogate. Adrienne voices the suspicions a reader may have logically accumulated about Kristen since the novel’s early chapters, and her profession as a therapist lends credence to those suspicions. She counters the weight of Emily’s narration by questioning Emily’s perceptions.
Kristen is closing in on every aspect of Emily’s life with a disconcerting consistency. She inserts herself into Emily’s friendship with Priya on social media. She inserts herself into Emily’s dates with Aaron. She even somehow seems to sense Emily’s growing physical intimacy with Aaron and interrupts that moment with a deceptively urgent text. None of these acts in itself is the mark of a smothering friend, but put together, these instances begin to form the pattern Adrienne wants Emily to notice.
The fact that Emily resists Adrienne’s characterization of Kristen’s behavior marks Emily as an unreliable narrator. By this point in the novel, readers can see that Emily’s characterizations are not accurate. She is too compromised by loyalty to Kristen to see her situation clearly. Emily imagines the friendship is mismatched—Kristen, she believes, takes better care of her than she takes of Kristen. Kristen’s actions, however, do not bear this out: A caring friend does not shut down and minimize all concern about a recent shared trauma; a caring friend does not expect constant attention after suddenly showing up from thousands of miles away with no warning; a caring friend does not ignore attempts to establish boundaries. Emily’s perspective on Kristen is too generous and uncritical, and therefore her narration cannot be read as a faithful representation of reality. While the unreliability of her narration at this point merely takes the form of unearned generosity toward Kristen, it will later become much more central to the plot.
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