57 pages • 1 hour read
Liane MoriartyThe Last Anniversary
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fate Versus Self-Determination
The novel explores the idea of fate, continually using the words “destiny,” “chance,” “fate,” and “luck.” The relationship between a sense of fate and the ability to self-determine is most closely linked to the protagonist, Sophie.
Sophie is fascinated by the idea of fate. Her parents’ love story gave her very high expectations for her own romantic life; they met as teenagers, and her mom took note of the time so that she could remember the exact moment when she met her soulmate. Because of this, Sophie adores Regency romances and holds the men around her to a very high standard. She frequently looks for coincidences and multiple meanings in everything around her. Connie’s will stipulates that she wants Sophie to consider dating a man whom Sophie will meet through house arrangements, and Sophie views every man that she meets after that as a possible contender for her soulmate. Sophie always wanted to have a big family; as an only child, she craves a larger support system. She is pleased to be welcomed into the Scribbly Gum Island family. Sophie’s obsession with Regency romances and fairy-tale endings has led her to develop “main character syndrome”; indeed, she views her new home as a key step in helping her achieve her fairy-tale ending:
At work, in meetings, watching people talk, Sophie can’t help but smugly imagine their dull suburban homes and soulless city apartments. She lives on an island. She can start an outboard motor. She owns a brand-new pair of gum boots! She feels different. Outdoorish. A touch tomboyish. Glowing with fresh air (229).
With every new encounter with a man, Sophie tries to envision if he will enable the same quality of fairy-tale romance that she believes her parents enjoy. Sophie does meet a wonderful partner who will help her create a family, but the novel emphasizes the nontraditional element of this partnership, as Eddie is gay:
It seems Sophie’s Fairy Godmother has made just a slight error of judgement. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the glass slipper slides onto her tiny foot… Prince Charming isn’t looking for a princess (437).
While Sophie vacillates between being a passive princess whose fairy-tale ending has already been written for her and proactively seeking out her prince, Rose and Connie more defensively approach their fates. Growing up during the Depression, the sisters were forced to make ends meet in any way they could, and through stubbornness, grit, and slightly Machiavellian maneuvering, the sisters were able to save themselves from financial worry and carve out their own destinies. Rose notes that it’s lovely to be rich, and the financial comfort of her adult life stands in stark contrast to the impoverished conditions that she and Connie experienced as teenagers. Each character confronts the childish idealism of believing everyone has a preordained, set path in order to take charge of their lives.
Female Solidarity and Secrets
As in many of her novels, Moriarty demonstrates the deep bonds of female relationships. Whether it is the relationship between sisters, relatives, or friends, the bond between women experiencing similar conflicts is strengthened in a way that their male counterparts cannot understand. Rose and Connie are sisters bound by past trauma, a lifechanging secret, and a genuine enjoyment of each other’s company. Everything they think and do is performed with an awareness of each other. At Connie’s funeral, Rose thinks:
Wait till she tells Connie! She turns back around and sees the coffin again, lustrous black, like a grand piano. It hits her with a horrible lurch that she won’t be eating cinnamon toast tonight at Connie’s kitchen table and telling her all about her own funeral. It is pointless saving up the good bits (138).
While Connie and Jimmy enjoyed a happy marriage, Connie’s relationship with her sister fulfilled many needs that her relationship with Jimmy could not. Rose fears intimacy after the trauma of her teenage years, and a physical relationship with a man seems terrifying and demeaning after the dehumanizing objectification of sexual assault:
But the thought of a man touching her hand, her shoulder, her breast, as if they were all separate possessions of his, makes Rose want to gag. Move this way. Move that way. Open your mouth. Lift your hips (233).
Within the spaces of female relationships, sisters, friends, mothers, daughters, aunts, and nieces find freedom. There is currency in secret-keeping (quite literally in the case of Rose and Connie). Even Ron acknowledges the power of the women in the family who run the island, but he views this as a commentary on their poor judgment rather than as a sign of their abilities:
Executives with MBAs who are running multi-million-dollar corporations come to him for advice, but not the old women in his own family. It doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to any of them, not even his wife (147).
Ron is too busy considering his own status to reflect that the women in his family don’t need his professional help, let alone to see this as a matter of shared pride. In focusing on this side of his male identity, Ron misses the opportunity to see how he could play a positive role in his family, adopting a different approach from that of his professional life.
Female friendship offers powerful support, but can also create a sense of competition over life stages. The exhausting act of comparison also allows women the opportunity to consider how they would feel occupying different roles. Sophie in particular benefits from her many female friendships. Within her close group of school friends, she is the sole unmarried non-mother, and she learns about her (un)willingness to occupy these roles through observing how these responsibilities impact, affect, and occasionally improve her friends’ lives. Sophie admires and envies Grace, whom she believes has the perfect life: She is talented and has a fascinating family, a loving husband, and an adorable baby. Grace admires and envies Sophie, whom she believes has the perfect life: Sophie is unburdened by depression, has a loving mother, and enjoys the freedom afforded to her by being single.
Loss of Identity in Relationships (Romantic and Maternal)
Moriarty’s novels are noted for their depiction of universal struggles of female identity. As this novel bears out, women are often encouraged to pursue marriage and motherhood, yet these institutions require making tremendous sacrifices in ways that husbands and fathers do not. Grace’s struggle with postpartum depression is one of the most poignant elements of the novel. Grace badly wanted to be a mother, but after a traumatic birth, she struggles to bond with her baby, and she feels tremendously guilty about this:
She thought perhaps the euphoria was running late and it would eventually hit her. One day she’d look at her son and fall in love with him like a proper mother. But Jake has been in the world now for three weeks and Grace is beginning to wonder, with a sort of tired inevitability, if she will never feel anything except the enormous responsibility of keeping his tiny heart beating, his tiny lungs breathing. It seems she might have to fake it for the rest of her life (111).
It is generally physically harder and more time-consuming to be a mother than it is to be a father, and Grace loathes herself for not immediately mastering every element of motherhood. She envies Callum’s quick adaption into fatherhood, but Callum also goes to work every day and does not have to breastfeed, so he only has to play dad for a short period of time each day. Grace’s relatives do not think she has postpartum depression because she appears to be functioning well. Callum’s concerns about his wife are discounted by Margie:
Look at those beautiful thank you cards she sent out to us all. Now, I can assure you a woman with postnatal depression would not be able to manage that (224).
Enigma’s attitude is typical of women of her generation, as she believes that postpartum depression is just something inevitable that all mothers must accept:
Of course you feel depressed after you have a baby! Who wouldn’t? It’s when you realise how much damned work they are and that you’re stuck with them forever! I cried solidly for the first six weeks after Laura was born. I thought my life had ended. Your father just pretended not to notice. I remember my teardrops sizzling in the pan while I cooked his chops (226).
The novel therefore explores society’s expectations of mothers and, by juxtaposing Grace’s experience with the opinions of her family, who do love her but are misguided, shows how dangerous it can be for these assumptions to prevent active support.
Just as new mothers can easily lose their sense of self as they are burdened with new tasks and hormones, women pursuing romantic relationships may find that they are too willing to compromise on their sense of self when identifying a potential partner. Sophie envisions the different versions of herself that would date Ian or Rick or even steal Callum from Grace. By deciding to instead build an unconventional family with Eddie, Sophie commits to her elementary-school self, once again finding solidarity with Eddie, her original male (non-sexual) partner.
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