50 pages • 1 hour read
Danielle ValentineDelicate Condition
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapter 9-Interlude 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Your Baby Is as Big as a Pear” - Part 4: “You Might Start to Feel Your Baby Kick”
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary
Two months later, Anna and Dex are staying at Talia’s unused house in Southampton. While Anna is being driven back from a yoga class by Kamal, the bodyguard that she and Dex have hired, she begins to have debilitating pain. She tries to call Siobhan, but a woman whose voice she doesn’t recognize answers. The pain worsens, and Anna sees blood between her legs.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary
Dex meets Anna at the hospital, where Anna receives an ultrasound from a technician named Meg. After the ultrasound, Meg leaves to find a doctor. Anna, feeling like she might defecate, runs to the restroom and has a miscarriage.
Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary
Anna wakes to find herself back in the hospital bed, attended by Dex and a doctor, Dr. Crawford. Dr. Crawford confirms that Anna had a miscarriage. When Dr. Crawford mentions that Anna hasn’t recently had an ultrasound, and Anna and then Dex contradict him, they learn that there is no hospital technician named Meg. Anna, feeling violated and certain that Meg must be connected to her cyberstalker, returns home with Dex. Anna says that she’ll want to start IVF again soon, but Dex rejects this idea, arguing that they should find out the truth behind Meg first.
Anna calls Siobhan, who was worried. Her friend who had answered the phone, Olympia, who works at a birthing center, told her about Anna’s call. Siobhan, despite sounding tired, tells Anna that she’ll come over and keep her company. While she waits, Anna drinks bourbon and heads down to the basement, where Talia, who is also undergoing IVF, has stored her baby supplies. While on the basement floor, on her back and staring at the ceiling, Anna feels her baby moving in her stomach—she tells herself that she’s too drunk to judge what’s really happening.
Interlude 3 Summary: “Abigail Rowe, 1789”
In 1789, Elizabeth, maid to Abigail, the lady of Arden House, listens to her employer give birth. Abigail has asked her doctor to leave the room. She’s attended instead by a midwife who Elizabeth and Abigail first consulted when Abigail started trying to get pregnant. The midwife used a folk remedy to aid with the conception and made Abigail promise that she would be allowed in the room when Abigail gave birth. Hearing her employer’s screams, Elizabeth enters Abigail’s bed chamber and sees that she has given birth to something “small and pink and squirming” (123) that she deems “monstrous.”
Part 4, Chapter 12 Summary
The next morning, Anna wakes while Dex is still asleep and thinks she hears an intruder. She finds that Talia is in the house giving herself a hormone injection. Anna helps her and then tells her what happened at the hospital. As the two women commiserate, Talia mentions that she’s surprised Anna is still using Emily as her publicist, since all of Emily’s other clients have abandoned her. Talia leaves before Anna digs into why this is the case.
Later that day, Anna receives a phone call from Gracie, Siobhan’s daughter, who lets Anna know that Siobhan is in the hospital because her cancer has returned. Anna, devastated by this news, goes for a run on the beach. While running, she discovers a doll of a character that she once played; someone drew a red “X” over the doll’s stomach, which Anna interprets as a threat.
Part 4, Chapter 13 Summary
Anna returns to the house with Kamal. She immediately poses the question “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?” (145) in her phone’s calendar and changes her passwords back. Anna and Dex argue about whether or not the doll should be interpreted as a threat, but Kamal, agreeing with Anna, contacts the police. Anna later receives a call from Emily, who wants Anna to do more publicity work, and Anna tells her about the miscarriage. In offering apologies, Emily mentions that Anna should spend time on the beach; this comment disturbs Anna, who never told Emily that Talia’s house is on a beach.
Part 4, Chapter 14 Summary
After finding Talia’s house on Google Earth and convincing herself that this is how Emily knew she was on a beach, Anna goes to see Siobhan, who’s too ill to speak to her. Anna returns home just before a blizzard comes through, stranding her and Dex in the house. As Anna takes a shower that night, she feels something moving in her stomach again—she feels that her baby is still alive.
Interlude 4 Summary: “Judy Marshall, 1957”
In 1957, Judy, at 42 years old, talks to her neighbor, Maude, about her unexpected pregnancy. Judy doesn’t know if she can afford to have another child. Maude, rather than comforting her, tells her not to say such things because “there are people who will take that baby away from you if you aren’t careful what you say” (165). Soon after, Judy begins to hear someone moving through her attic while she’s alone in the house. Judy goes to confront the intruder and finds a woman in the attic who tells Judy that she’s going to help.
Part 3, Chapter 9-Interlude 4 Analysis
This section begins with one of the most vivid and emotionally wrenching moments in the novel—Anna’s miscarriage. Valentine creates this intense visceral series of scenes in part through how she portrays Anna’s sense of embodiment. In the moments before the miscarriage, Anna describes her pain as having “surrounded me in a thick black cloud, like poison gas. I couldn’t think past it or through it, and I couldn’t claw my way out of it” (93). This description figures Anna’s pain as something all-consuming and unavoidable, a material part of her experience that can affect her but that she is helpless to affect in return. The “poison gas” simile also conjures additional physiological effects without Valentine having to directly describe them—it creates a sensation of suffocation, even paralysis. The intensity and complexity of these descriptions makes Anna’s pain evident and accessible to any reader and, consequentially, compounds the betrayal and anger Anna experiences at Patriarchal Institutions’ Failure to Acknowledge Female Pain. Every time the men and institutions in Anna’s life deny that her pain is real, the reader, through Anna’s perspective, is similarly gaslighted.
Anna’s struggles with patriarchal institutions and the men who uphold them are reflected metaphorically in her struggles with her publicist, who is similarly demanding yet suspect. Much of the plot of this section concerns Emily: Anna learns from Talia that her publicist has recently been fired by most of her other clients; Emily makes the suspicious admission that she knows Anna is at a beach house; and Anna realizes that Emily has access to her calendars. Valentine uses Emily as a red herring—a classic plotting device in the thriller/horror genre. The red herring, a potential clue or suspect intended to mislead the reader, allows the protagonist to actively investigate the story’s central mystery, thereby creating narrative momentum, while simultaneously allowing the author to seed information that will be relevant to the central mystery’s ultimate conclusion. Emily is a particularly effective red herring in part because Valentine already suggested in Part 1 that Emily has access to Anna’s calendar—something the reader realizes before Anna does. Valentine also keeps Emily’s potential motivations obscured—it’s never revealed, for instance, why Emily’s clients have been leaving her. This vagueness allows the reader, like Anna, to speculate about Emily’s motivations and to feel the same tension Anna feels as she tries to make sense of the mysteries plaguing her.
Valentine also uses the interludes in this section as a means of creating narrative tension. These two interludes tell two horrific, but ultimately very different, stories of pregnant women. Abigail Rowe’s story begins to develop the idea of the child/birthing process as something monstrous, while Judy Marshall’s story hints at the idea that there are shadowy and invasive systems in place to deal with women who are desperate because of their pregnancy. Both of these stories engage elements of Anna’s experience of pregnancy while also hinting at drastically different directions the narrative could take from this point. Because Valentine never draws any clear connections between the interludes and Anna’s ordeal, it’s left to the reader to hypothesize about what these connections might be, or how the theme of Monstrosity as Female Survival might connect to the invader in Judy Marshall’s house. By raising these questions without providing firm answers, Valentine creates thematic tensions between the sections of the novel.
