Felix Ever After

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-18

Chapters 19-21

Chapters 22-25

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Unhealthy Versus Healthy Love

As Felix hopes to love and be loved for the first time, he must learn the difference between unhealthy and healthy love. Felix is habituated to unhealthy love through his unrequited search for adoration from his mother. Because she left him when he was 10 and never responded to his email coming out as transgender, Felix wonders if his mother still loves him. In the hundreds of emails that he drafts to her, he repeatedly asks if she loves him and tells her how she’s made him feel unworthy of love. Part of his journey toward maturity is recognizing that his mother’s absence is not a reflection of his lovability or worthiness. This becomes more clear after an honest conversation with Felix’s father, who says of his failed marriage,

‘It wasn’t healthy. If I fall in love again, it’ll be with a woman who loves me also—not someone who I have to convince to love me. It’s easier, I think, to love someone you know won’t love you—to chase them, knowing they won’t feel the same way—than to love someone who might love you back. To risk loving each other and losing it all’ (225).

This quote elucidates the lesson that Felix learns himself after falling for Declan and then discovering his love for Ezra.

While Felix desires love, he is not emotionally open to it. In Chapter 8, when Ezra platonically tells Felix that he loves him, Felix is unable to respond despite their status as inseparable best friends. Ezra’s love for Felix is clearly healthy and unconditional; he is constantly validating Felix’s experiences and sticking up for him. An example of this is when Felix is talking about being nervous to question his gender identity again and Ezra reminds him that his trans identity is not a burden on his father or anyone else. Because Felix is so uncertain of himself, so convinced that he’s unlovable, he finds it hard to believe Ezra could be in love with him and even hopes it is not true, despite how much Ezra supports his growth and well-being.

In his relationship with Declan, Felix is chasing an unrequited love, because Declan is actually in love with Lucky, not Felix himself, as evidenced by Declan saying, “I just hoped that, maybe, if we had sex, I’d feel like you love me as much as I love you—you as Lucky, I mean…” (312). While Declan is in love with Lucky, Felix is in love with the idea of someone falling in love with him; the foundation of their relationship is unhealthy, born out of deceit and the desire for revenge.

The difference between Declan and Ezra’s love can be seen in Felix’s kisses with each. Ezra asks Felix is he can kiss him, giving him gentle pointers on how to do it. Declan teases Felix, not kissing him as a punishment for Felix’s catfishing; once they do kiss, Declan pressures Felix to have sex. Falling in love with Ezra scares Felix because he knows it would be healthy, and he fears losing that relationship:

Ezra and I—we’d make so much sense. We support each other, love each other, have always been there for one another… It’s so perfect that the fear of it all ending, of him realizing that he doesn’t love me anymore, of him leaving me the same way my mother left, fills the hollow in my chest (258).

It is easier for Felix to run toward an unhealthy love with Declan, knowing that it won’t hurt so badly if and when it ends, then to accept healthy love with Felix, who will undoubtably break his heart if and when it ends.

This dynamic is echoed in Felix’s friendships with Marisol and Leah. For the first part of the book, Felix does not tell anyone about Marisol’s transphobic comments because he wants to prove that he’s worth her love. As Felix gains self-worth, he stops hanging out with Marisol and begins building his relationship with Leah, who actually wants to be his friend, sticking up for him and helping him see how beautiful his art is. Though healthy, genuine love—whether platonic or romantic—requires vulnerability, by the end of the novel, Felix understands the worth of such meaningful connections, and he’s willing to take that risk.

Worth and Self-Worth

As the characters in this book grapple with their identities, relationships, and futures, self-worth is a major theme. Felix is a poor, Black, queer, trans person living in a world that devalues all those identities, and his classmates perpetuate this harm. Felix struggles to believe himself worthy of getting into a good art school, falling in love, and having the world respect his expanding gender identity; he is motivated to prove his worth to others, and thus himself.

An example of how the world at large shows Felix that he is not worthy of respect is gentrification; Felix and his father are forced to move from the neighborhood they love because they are priced out, no longer valued members of the community. The same dynamics are perpetuated on a small scale at St. Cat’s, an example being how Marisol implies that Felix is not worthy of her love or respect because he is trans and she thinks that being trans is misogynistic. All this makes it easy to see why Felix struggles with his self-worth despite loving his identities.

In Felix’s mind, getting into Brown would prove his value to the world, so he obsesses over getting in and is extremely stressed about his portfolio. When Ezra asks Felix why Brown is his dream school, he responds,

‘people like Declan, and Marisol—no one would question whether any of you are worth getting into a place like Brown. But me? […] I just want to prove that I’m good enough, too. That I deserve it. It’s kind of like proving that—I don’t know, proves I deserve respect and love, too’ (121).

Felix feels less worthy of getting into an Ivy League school like Brown than his classmates because he is poor and trans. Ezra, who recognizes that Felix is searching for validation from external sources, tells Felix that what matters is that he loves and respect himself. Of course, this is easy for Ezra to say because he is rich and cisgendered, two traits that society values.

As Felix takes Ezra’s advice to heart and begins developing his sense of self-worth, he overcomes fears that are holding him back and, in turn, accomplishes his goals. By the end of the book, Felix has enough self-worth that the prospect of getting rejected from Brown doesn’t scare him so badly. Once Felix realizes that he is worthy, he creates a series of self-portraits that he is genuinely proud of and wins the end-of-summer gallery competition. As Felix comes to love himself, he also realizes that he is worthy of love from others, and he accepts the love that Ezra has had for him all along.

Identity and Labels

Felix exists within an intersection of queer, trans, Black, and poor identities, which leads to a uniquely difficult experience of oppression. Felix’s identities are weaponized against him throughout the story. For example, Austin anonymously, and then in person, tells Felix that he is unlovable because of his identity as a trans person; he believes that Ezra will fall out of love with Felix if he remembers that Felix is trans. Declan and James also make comments that insinuate Felix is fraudulent or weird because of his gender and racial identities. Despite these attempts to use Felix’s identities to hurt him, Felix self-defines and claims his identities as sources of love. During his gallery speech, he says, “there’s something weird about suggesting that my identity is the thing that brought me any sort of pain. It’s the opposite. Being trans brings me love” (351).

As Felix and his cohort of largely queer and/or BIPOC classmates and acquaintances move through the summer, multiple discussions about the utility of labels that describe such identities arise. For Felix, labels are a useful and important tool; in an email to his mother, he writes, “Some people say we shouldn’t need labels. That we’re trying to box ourselves in too much… It feels good to me, to know I’m not alone. That someone else has felt the same way I’ve felt, experienced the same things I’ve experienced” (58).

Although Felix is proud of his identities, he also struggles with the concept of changing his labels; at first, he believes that because he has already come out as trans, coming out again with a different gender identity will make people deem him a fraud or a burden. This thought process shows one difficulty with labels, which is that they can make people feel boxed into a single identity or else caught in a rigid binary with no room for fluidity. However, labels can also be validating. After researching more genderqueer and trans terminology, Felix finds the label “demiboy,” which aligns with his gender identity and reveals there is a more niche community under the larger umbrella of trans identities.

Ezra, on the other hand, feels better without a label and hypothesizes about a world without them, saying, “If there were no straight people, no violence or abuse or homophobia or anything, would we even need labels, or would we just be?” (81). Ezra tells Felix that he has never questioned his gender identity before, so it is probable that living without labels is easier for Ezra because he exists in a society where being cisgender is the social norm. Meanwhile, Felix and other non-cisgender individuals may need or desire validation that their gender identity experience is not anomalous, which can be found through shared gender identity labels like demiboy. During the LGBT Center gender identity discussion group, Wally describes a similar utopian sentiment to Ezra but argues that labels are useful for creating community and finding validation in the meantime.