The Adoration of Jenna Fox

“There is something curious about where we live. Something curious about Lily. Something curious about Father and his nightly phone calls with Mother. And certainly something curious about me. Why can I remember the details of the French Revolution but I can’t remember if I ever had a best friend” 

“Curious” is a key world for Jenna, and this is its first use. It reveals how Jenna sees herself and her family.

“It seems that everyone in this house is reinventing themselves and no one is who they once were” 

The idea of reinvention and restoration runs throughout the early Sections of the book. Though Jenna knows very little, she knows that everyone in her family has changed themselves. 

“I smile and I don’t even have to think about lifting the corners of my mouth. It happens on its own. Mr. Bender is curious. So am I. I’m not lost. I am not no longer known. Mr. Bender knows me” 

Jenna has been feeling alienated and “lost,” and with the discovery of her first post-accident friend, she realizes that many people are strange. This connection comforts her. 

“Jenna Fox is inside me after all. Just when I was ready to move on without her,  she surfaces. Don’t forget me she says. I don’t think she’ll let me”

Jenna is frequently conflicted about the relationship between her old and her new selves. Although she would like to move on and become a fully new person, the memories she carries with her from “old” Jenna prevent her from doing so. 

“As the Cotswold sees improvement, workers coming and going and restoring, it is like she expects to see the same measure of improvement in mine. Restored shingles. Restored flooring. Restored Jenna. I don’t want restoration. I want a life” 

Here, Jenna resists her mother’s desire to “renovate” her. Rather than being restored to what she once was, Jenna wants the opportunity to control her own life and destiny.

“I flee from my closed world into one I haven’t met yet”

This is Jenna’s first step toward claiming her independence, and shows her desire to see and experience new worlds. 

“Jenna is so used to every move being recorded at this point that she seems to have surrendered herself to the adoration of Jenna Fox. There is no such thing as hurry for Mother and Father. I am too important. Why is this Jenna Fox so strong, but I feel less powerful than a single kilowatt?” 

This quote speaks to what the “old” Jenna’s life was like—constantly recorded, constantly adored. It shows the way Mother and Father obsessed over their miracle child, and how the old Jenna Fox accepted it, though she did not enjoy it. 

“That’s what I remember most from the discs, a desperation to stay on the pedestal...I see Jenna, smiling, laughing, chattering. And falling. When you are perfect, is there anywhere else to go?” 

In her life before the accident, Jenna faced a constant pressure to perform and to succeed at any costs. By viewing the home videos, Jenna is able to fully witness the desperation in the old Jenna’s life, and actively decide that she wants something vastly different for herself. 

“Are the details of our lives who we are, or is it owning those details that makes the difference?” 

This is a key question for Jenna, who struggles with her identity and wonders if she is merely an artificial shadow of a human being. In the end, Jenna decides that both the details of her life—her friendship with Mr. Bender, her love for Ethan, as well as taking ownership over those details by destroying her backup—make her human. 

“That environment was my hell. My black void I didn’t understand. My endless vacuum where I suffocated, screamed, cried, but no one came to help me. My own father put me there” 

With this quote, Jenna realizes that it was her parents who caused her immeasurable pain and anguish. Though they were doing it because they loved her and wanted to save her, they damaged her nonetheless. 

“But what about my missing heart? My missing liver? I don’t want five hundred billion neural chips. I want guts” 

Here, Jenna takes a stand. What is most important to her is not her amazing new brain power, but the human qualities she has lost, guts and all. She wants to feel natural, even with all of the associated dangers.

“What about a soul, Father? When you were so busy implanting all your neural chips, did you think about that? Did you snip my soul from my old body, too? Where did you put it? Show me! Where? Where in all this groundbreaking technology did you insert my soul?” 

Jenna frequently struggles with whether or not she possesses a soul. A soul is intangible and cannot be recreated, and that is what she is most concerned with having, above a brain and perfect arms and legs. 

“Every ounce of our breath was sucked out of us. For days we didn’t breathe. Literally, that’s what it felt like. And every time I looked at you, I was afraid to look away again, like my eyes were the only thing anchoring you to this earth. It was unbearable every time I looked at you, but I couldn’t look away either. So, if we didn’t do everything just right, understand it wasn’t just you who’s been through hell”

This is what Mother says to Jenna, attempting to explain why she and Father made the choice they did. The unbreakable love of a parent for their child is a recurring theme throughout the novel, and this quote shows just how viscerally painful the experience was for Mother and Father. It explains, but does not necessarily justify, their actions.

“But then when I am feeling the least human, I remember kidding Ethan and feeling intensely alive—more alive than I think the old Jenna could have ever felt” 

Through her relationship with Ethan, Jenna discovers that there are parts of the human experience that the old Jenna did not have an opportunity to enjoy—namely, romantic love. It is an important moment in Jenna’s journey towards discovering her own humanity, outside of her past. 

“I wonder. Is there such a thing? A real Jenna? Or was the old me always waiting to be someone else, too?” 

Again, this foreshadows Jenna’s growing split from her old persona and her past. It is the first time she acknowledges that the old Jenna was not a fully-formed human being either, but had much more to discover about herself and the world. 

“The dictionary says my identity should be all about being separate or distinct, and yet it feels like it is so wrapped up in others”

This passage marks Jenna’s realization that the dictionary will not always contain the kind of definitions she is looking for. Additionally, where she was once so cold and distant with others, she now finds that her very identity is entangled with theirs.

“Thoughts like this are not written down or uploaded into my Bio Gel. These thoughts are mine alone and no one else’s. They exist nowhere in the universe but within me” 

For Jenna, this is a turning point. She recognizes that her thoughts and experiences are what make her an individual, not the Bio Gel and the ghost of the old Jenna. It is what she thinks and feels that determine who she really is, and this realizations steels her resolve to destroy any brain backup that could replace what makes her her. 

“She is not listening. Neither of them are. They don’t want to believe that the place I occupied for eighteen months was anything less than a dreamy waiting room. And time is all I’ve given them. Time. Months. Years. A lifetime of being theirs. Will a time come when I can ever say no?”

In this moment, Jenna sees that her parents will willfully ignore her feelings and experiences in order to keep her safe, protected, and within arm’s reach. This is one place where the old and new Jennas converge, both realizing how much they have given up to Mother and Father, and wondering whether they will ever be granted freedom.

“Maybe that’s what I see when I look at you, Jenna. Someone who will never fit in again in quite the same way. Someone like me. Someone with a past that’s changed their future forever” 

This is something Ethan says to Jenna as she tries to explain why they can’t be together. Ethan refuses to accept that Jenna is in any way unnatural or not whole. Instead, he sees parallels between his life and Jenna’s. He knows what it is like to have to hide, keep secrets, and doubt his own humanity. This, he argues, is why he and Jenna must stick together, rather than break apart. 

“All your pieces fill up other people’s holes. But they don’t fill up your own” 

Here, Jenna is reacting to the final video disc, where she delivers her expected performance rather than make her own choices. She feels pulled apart by Mother and Father’s wants, and feels as though her own needs are not being met. 

“There is no fanfare. The sun doesn’t stop its ascent...One small changed family doesn’t calculate into a world that has been spinning for a billion years. But one small change makes the world spin differently in a billion ways for one family” 

Jenna has just thrown the backups into the pond. And though her world and her parents’ worlds have forever changed as a result, she sees and appreciates that the vast world outside of them will keep going. She compares the macro scale of a constantly changing and evolving world to the micro scale of her small family. Both are important. 

“I breathe in the difference of being on this earth now and maybe not tomorrow, the precipitous edge of something new for me but as ancient as the beginning of time” 

Where Jenna once felt “lost” in the world and angry at her parents for making the choices they did, she has changed. She now feels grateful and happy to experience life on earth, made more poignant by the fact that she has destroyed the backup and is once again mortal. 

“But people change. And the world will change. Or that much I am certain” 

Jenna has just outlined the many changes that have occurred in the last two hundred and sixty years, but her experience have proved to her that nothing is static. She changed, Allys changed, her parents changed. Everything changes, for better or worse.