The Last Anniversary

“It would be so satisfying, almost wickedly satisfying, to feed a hungry, appreciative man like that, to keep on dishing out steaming helpings until he pressed one hand to his stomach and protested, ‘No, no, I can’t eat another thing.’ One day, Connie would live in a house with a pantry full of food. It was not right. Skinny (handsome!) boys like Jimmy Thrum shouldn’t be hungry.”

Growing up in the Depression, Connie’s life often centers around food (or the lack of food), and she learns how to be a good cook in order to maximize experience with limited ingredients. Connie’s love language is cooking for other people, a practical means of taking care of them. Her "almost wicked” desire to feed Jimmy is intensely sensual, and linked to her desire to be a homemaker.

“She doesn’t want to be Deborah at home with pretty, growling, meowing baby Lily. She really doesn’t. She would rather be single, desperate-for-a-man Sophie.”

Throughout the text, Sophie acknowledges that she feels pressure to conform to heteronormative expectations about romantic partnerships and parental obligations. She is continually shown as conflicted as she manages the different opinions and expectations of society, her friends, and family, comparing herself to others. Her difficulty in understanding what she truly wants is at the heart of her character’s trajectory, as the novel shows her growing in self-knowledge.

“It is just that there is not time to feel things any more. Looking after the baby is like taking some sort of terrifying, never-ending practical exam. All she does is respond to what the baby is doing. Feed baby. Change baby. Wash baby. Keep baby alive. Prepare for when baby wakes again. When will it all be over? When will she have time to think and feel again?”

Grace expresses her intense feeling that she no longer has time to be a person. This passage expresses her anxiety and exhaustion, and her lack of enjoyment in the experience of motherhood. This early description of Grace’s state of mind lays the groundwork for the increasing distress she feels as the novel develops.

“Of course, now, four years later, it turns out that they are just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill married couple. She is fine with that. She is so fine with that. After all, she’s a realist. Callum doesn’t dance her around the room quite so often, but that is to be expected after all this time. You have to expect the passion to wane. You have to expect these hot flares of irritation, like lit matches.”

Grace recognizes that her marriage has not lived up to her expectations, but she also realizes that it would be unrealistic to expect any marriage to be devoid of arguments or banal moments. Grace acknowledges that part of building a life with someone includes adjusting expectations about her own identity as well as her husband’s, but her narrative is still redolent of disappointment. This passage shows Grace grappling with the fallout from having idealistic expectations.

“Grace wonders if she should be worried about letting so many strangers hold him, but decides it’s worth it. He is being topped up with all the proper motherly love he is missing out on.”

Grace frequently feels guilty for not being an adequate mother, and compares her maternal abilities to those of the women around her. When she gives the tour of the Munro house to the group of women named Shirley, she marvels at the Shirleys’ capacity for motherhood, which she views as starkly contrasting her own.

“‘There is nothing sleazy or desperate about Internet dating,’ declares Lisa, who met her boyfriend in a Paris bookstore. ‘I know so many people who are doing it, you don’t need to feel ashamed,’ says Shari, married to a paramedic who fell in love with her when he was winched down by helicopter to rescue her after she broke her ankle in a bushwalking accident. ‘It’s fun, it’s great fun, it’s so easy and convenient,’ cries Amanda, who actually did meet her husband on the Internet. Sophie doesn’t really like Amanda’s husband, and she suspects that Amanda doesn’t like him much either, which accounts for her demented enthusiasm on the topic.”

This passage is characteristic of Moriarty’s humor. Like many of the conversations between Sophie and her friends, this conversation reveals the pressure they make her feel to find a heteronormative romantic relationship. Because the passage highlights the friends’ hypocrisy in various ways, it suggests that the friends urge Sophie to find a man because they feel it ratifies their own life choices.

“Part of her had been thinking that this whole thing with Aunt Connie’s house had been all about destiny. It had been her destiny to become friends with Veronika, even though it was an annoying friendship at times. It was her destiny to date Veronika’s brother, Thomas, even though it had all ended so horribly. It was her destiny to live in Aunt Connie’s wonderful home on Scribbly Gum Island. That was the final pay-off. She deserved it!”

Sophie’s worldview is dominated by her tendency to romanticize. Her parents’ relationship and her Regency romances gave her very high expectations for romantic encounters, and she frequently views herself as a main character in pursuit of a happy ending. This causes Sophie to sometimes act passively, since she believes that she is guided by a narrative power more than by her own free will, echoing the theme of Fate Versus Self-Determination.

“But now it occurs to Sophie to wonder if perhaps she had been subconsciously manipulating her destiny.”

Sophie is drawn to the idea of being controlled by fate rather than being an independent person. Connie’s will and the suggestion that Sophie will end up with a man that Connie has chosen for her buttress this idea, and Sophie considers that her relationship with Thomas was not meant to end in marriage; it was only meant to end with her inheriting Connie’s house and achieving a different kind of fulfillment. Sophie plays with the idea of destiny depending on her preferences; the novel shows this mode of thinking as a way to self-comfort and to avoid active decision-making.

“I knew, you see, and I knew he knew too. I quickly peeked a look at my watch so I’d always remember the exact moment that I met my husband. Twenty past two, eleventh of June, 1962.”

The story of Sophie’s parents’ first meeting has ingrained in Sophie the idea of soulmates and romantic fate. Because of Sophie’s parents’ first encounter and their conflict-free, blissful marriage, Sophie expects to experience a similarly idealistic relationship.

“It will be bliss. It is like the life she’s always wanted without ever knowing it—and this lovely old woman has just handed it to her—‘here, take this life’—a glittering gift, like something in a fairytale.

Because Sophie frequently views herself as a character rather than as an active individual with agency, she tends to romanticize anything that allows her to passively receive happiness. By leaving her house to Sophie, Connie has bolstered Sophie’s view of herself as a heroine who deserves to be handed beautiful things.

“There was a tangible sense of relief emanating from Thomas. It was as though all his life these achievements—home, wife, baby—had been weighing heavy on his mind, and now he’d finally checked them all off he could relax and benignly observe the rest of the world still flailing about trying to reach their own little islands of security.”

Thomas strongly believes that personal fulfillment comes not from everyday happiness but from achieving aspects of traditional relationships. He wanted to be married more than he wanted to be married to Sophie. After rebounding with Deborah, he feels some smug satisfaction that he has achieved what Sophie has not. Thomas’s character shows that men can be subject to these social pressures as well as women.

“She wants to be good at this. Being a mother is just like any other new skill, like driving a car or playing tennis. At first it seems impossibly difficult, but then, by gritting your teeth and trying again and again, you get your head around it. She just has to get her head, her stupid aching head, around this new skill.”

Grace struggles to maintain her sense of self as she adjusts to the demands of motherhood. Her identity is in flux as she relinquishes the hobbies and feelings that once defined her in order to make way for a demanding list of tasks. Femininity is frequently equated with maternal prowess, and a lack of maternal feeling causes Grace to feel like an inadequate woman.

“Now her untouched body felt like a plant drooping without water. Her skin was drying up and shriveling before her eyes, becoming astonishingly ugly, as if the touch of Jimmy’s fingers had been keeping it alive.”

Connie’s sense of self closely relies on her marital identity. The metaphor of Connie’s skin as a thirsty plant emphasizes the wholesome nature of her relationship with Jimmy as he sustains her and supports her. Like many of her female relatives, Connie relies on her relationship with a man to help her understand her role and priorities.

“‘I’ll be very, very sad if you go and live on the moon,’ said Melly the Music Box Dancer, looking rather glum. Gublet felt angry. ‘Don’t make me feel guilty, you frilly pink bitch!’ […] Then he had a clever thought. He would find a NEW best friend for Melly so she wouldn’t be lonely when he went to live on the moon. It was SUCH a clever thought!”

The narrative inserts of Grace’s drafts of her children’s book offer insight into her mental state. Pieced together, the selections reveal the graduation devolution of Gublet, who is eager to end his relationship with his best friend so that he may go to the moon. Gublet reflects Grace’s suicidal ideation and demonstrates the extent of her distress.

“Grace needs to have a replacement woman waiting in the wings, an understudy, someone who is already like part of the family, someone who wants the role, someone better qualified for it in the first place.”

As Grace’s suicidal ideation becomes more pronounced, she more aggressively seeks a replacement for herself. She considers Sophie an ideal replacement because Sophie is an honorary family member and conveniently lives on the island. Grace is insecure about her introverted tendencies and her inability to dance; Sophie is skilled in the areas where Grace is flawed, and Grace believes that her flaws are things that Callum resents her for. Grace believes that Sophie will compensate for her perceived inadequacies as a wife and mother.

“They have fights, horrible in their banality. Callum had truly thought that if they ever fought, their fights would be operatic, and passionate, over big, complex issues, and they would probably end up in bed. He didn’t envisage these petty, pathetic spats. He hates that hatchet-hard tone she can get in her voice over something as trivial as a wet towel left on a bed or a breakfast bowl not put in the sink.”

Callum’s contemplation of his fights with Grace echoes Grace’s earlier contemplation of the same subject. This repetition offers a clever mirroring of two different perspectives. Both Grace and Callum believed that their relationship would be special, but Callum had more idealistic expectations for how exceptional their marriage would be.

“One of his brothers had told him, ‘Don’t be surprised if you don’t feel anything when you first see the baby. It takes a while to get your head around it. It’s different for women. They’ve got hormones. It’s an unfair advantage.’”

Moriarty cleverly juxtaposes several characters’ perspectives on the same subjects. After a contemplation of Grace’s views of motherhood and her feelings of deep inadequacy for not immediately falling in love with her baby (and her envy that her husband appeared to do so), Callum contemplates his fears about not falling in love with his baby. The statement about hormones is ironic, as it shows the assumption that Grace will automatically bond with Jake; instead, her hormones are causing her to experience postpartum depression.

“What would it have been like to have a man love you like that? Would it have changed something fundamental in your psyche to wake up each morning knowing that you were loved, that someone wanted to touch your body even when it got all old and wrinkly?”

Rose ponders her own unhappy love life, which stands in stark contrast to that of her happily married sister. Many of the characters suffer from wanting what they can’t have or imagining that the grass is always greener on the other side: The married characters crave the freedom of singlehood, and the single characters crave the stability of marriage.

“I think it’s different when you grow up somewhere like this. It’s like people who grow in a small country town and want to escape to the big city. When I was thirteen I wrote in my diary, ‘This island is like jail’ and drew a very dramatic picture of me peering out from behind bars.”

Grace personifies the desire to escape; she is perpetually unhappy wherever she is, and at times is eager to flee her home, her marriage, motherhood, and her life in general. From Sophie’s perspective, Scribbly Gum Island is a marvelous paradise and Grace is incredibly fortunate to have grown up there; from Grace’s perspective, growing up on a small island surrounded mostly by family was incredibly isolating. Grace envies Sophie’s freedom, and Sophie envies Grace’s husband and baby.

“It was as if she’d started to become an entirely different person, a flippant, confident, funny person—the sort of person Rotund Ron believed her to be, and damn it, maybe he was right.”

Margie’s identity and self-esteem have been crushed by her marriage. She has spent decades taking care of Ron, who continues to belittle her and forces her to view herself through his critical view. Rotund Ron, her friend from her Weight Watchers meeting, sees potential in her and offers her the chance to discover the parts of herself that she is proud of.

“Margie had not had an affair with Rotund Ron. They’d never so much as kissed, but in some ways it felt like the whole experience of transforming their bodies had been more intimate, more physical, more sexy, more spiritual than any old affair involving middle-of-the-day sex in horrible sleazy highway motels and…Well, whatever else those affairs involved.”

Ron fears that his wife, whom he suddenly realizes he has not appreciated, is cheating on him. Margie has stayed loyal to Ron, but their friendship achieved a greater intimacy than Margie can currently reach with her husband because he does not view her potential. Rotund Ron enabled and encouraged her growth more than husband Ron ever has.

“It’s as if some sort of blurry substance has been peeled from her eyes and she can see him clearly for perhaps the first time in her life—an uncertain, greying, middle-aged man with a secret terror he’s not as smart or as classy as he’d like to be; a man who pretends he doesn’t care what other people think when he cares desperately; a man who despises himself so much that the only way he can alleviate his feelings of inferiority is by stomping down his wife’s personality with a daily stream of nasty jibes. A little man.”

After years of minimizing herself to maximize her husband, Margie is empowered by her weight loss and finally understands that her husband is not as superior as he would like to be. Now that she has some self-esteem, she allows herself to recognize the deleterious effect that her husband has had on her mental and physical health.

“Margie feels suddenly sick with this new power.”

After confronting her husband and telling him that she would like to go on a road trip around Australia by herself, Margie is empowered by the knowledge that she is capable of being defined not just by him. Coming to such a realization is so empowering and shocking that she feels physically unwell.