57 pages • 1 hour read
Colleen OakleyThe Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise
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.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss domestic abuse, sexual assault, and gun violence.
Jules, the daughter of Louise Wilt, calls the police to report her 84-year-old mother missing. Jules and her siblings have not heard from Louise in three days, and she missed her regular hair appointment. Jules also tells the police officer that Louise’s bridge friend hasn’t spoken with her recently, either. Jules and her siblings, Charlie and Lucy, are concerned but live far away enough from their mother that they cannot physically check in on her. Jules is also worried because her mother recently received some upsetting news. The officer asks Jules if her mother has any history of unpredictable behavior or dementia, to which Jules sarcastically replies, “Oh, just her entire life” (2). Jules then tells the officer that she suspects that her mother has been kidnapped, though deep down she knows that her mother has never done anything she didn’t want to do.
Chapter 2 Summary
Ten days before Jules’s phone call, Louise stares at the seemingly nondescript letter that she has received. The letter, from someone named George Dixon, has intense ramifications for Louise, based on an unnamed thing that she and George did together in the past. Still, Louise has no more time to ponder the implications of the letter, because she is expecting a guest.
Louise opens the door to a barefaced young woman in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt, Tanner Quimby. Tanner looks unhappy to be there, and Louise recalls the event that led to Tanner arriving on her doorstep: Louise tripped over the edge of a Turkish rug that her husband Ken, who passed away five years prior, chose. She fell and broke her hip. After Louise’s surgery and two months of inpatient care, Louise’s children decide that she is no longer fit to live alone and demanded that she either let one of the children move in with her or get a home care worker. Though Louise moves around just fine with a cane, she acquiesces and chooses Tanner, the daughter of one of Lucy’s friends. Louise and Tanner have an awkward conversation over tea and set out Tanner’s role as caretaker for Louise, which will mostly involve driving Louise to appointments since she cannot drive with her broken hip. Tanner tries to call Louise by her first name, but Louise insists on being addressed as Mrs. Wilt. Tanner ensures that there is a TV she can access with A/V capabilities, then leaves with the promise to return the next day. Louise returns to her concern about the letter and her past escape plan, knowing now that she’s going to have to run.
Chapter 3 Summary
Tanner returns to her parents’ house, sullen and upset about her circumstances. Her mother has kicked her out after Tanner had a “Hulk-out,” or a fit of rage, after her mother purchased the wrong type of pickles. Tanner goes down to the basement, which has been turned into her bedroom, to play Horizon Zero Dawn on her PS5. While playing, she reflects on the events that led to her living at home at 21. After spending her entire high school career focused on getting a full-ride soccer scholarship to Northwestern, she lost her scholarship during March of her junior year when she fell off the balcony of a frat house due to a faulty railing at a party she did not want to attend. She broke her leg so badly that the doctor said he wasn’t sure that she’d run again, meaning that her soccer career and her scholarship were done. Even with financial aid and student loans, Tanner was $10,000 short for tuition, leading her to move home and now move in with Louise.
Over dinner, Tanner’s dad expresses his excitement at Tanner’s job, while Tanner’s little brother, Harley, makes fun of her for being “crippled” and moving in with a “crippled” older lady (19). Tanner has another outburst when her mother suggests that she consider community college, as her return to Northwestern seems highly unlikely. Her dad tries to cut the tension by asking Tanner to visit and work on Bessie, their fixer-upper 1970 Fiat Racer, even though Tanner hasn’t worked on it with him at all since her return home.
After dinner, while packing, Tanner receives a text from Grant, a fellow Northwestern student with whom she had a sexual relationship during the summer before junior year. He broke it off with her once school started again but still sends her sexually explicit texts. She engages with him in the hopes that he’ll return to the Grant who wanted her and treated her well, but all she gets are the intermittent messages. Harley almost walks in on Tanner taking a picture of her cleavage, and though she scolds him for invading her privacy, she plays video games with him and tells him that she will miss him.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The first three chapters introduce the novel’s protagonists, Tanner and Louise, and their situations and motivations. The novel opens with Jules’s phone call with the police, which introduces Louise through the eyes of her daughter, who depicts her as a strong-willed, unpredictable elderly woman. Jules is worried, which provides indirect characterization about Louise: She is vulnerable as well as strong-willed. The next chapter clarifies this vulnerability since it shows Louise, 10 days before she goes missing, coping with her healing broken hip. This establishes the theme of Aging and the Body.
Colleen Oakley establishes conflict between Tanner and Louise at the beginning, since Louise is resentful of needing Tanner as a caretaker and losing the autonomy and freedom and living alone. However, Tanner and Louise are similar in that Tanner also struggles with her body and her broken leg, learning to live with both the physical pain of her leg and the emotional pain of her body being less capable than it used to be. This suggests that the real conflict will not be between Tanner and Louise; rather, they will share in the conflicts with external forces.
Tanner also carries a heavy amount of anger about her circumstances, which causes her to lash out at those around her, especially her family. In the first chapters she dwells in her self-pity and her pain at having lost her educational opportunities and her closest friends. Louise and Tanner don’t fall easily into friendship, and at the beginning of their relationship their conversation is stilted and terse, far different from the future Unlikely Friendship and Forgiveness they will come to share. Tanner has no friends at home in Atlanta, and though Jules tells the police officer that Louise is part of a bridge club, she is evidently often in solitude. Though their arrangement begins due to Tanner’s need for money and Louise’s need for someone to drive her places, their shared solitude and struggles are a foundation for a transformative relationship that will unfold across the events of the novel.
The opening chapters also allude to the novel’s central mysteries regarding what Louise did, who George is, and why they are in danger. Louise and her apprehension about the letter hint at something nefarious that happened in the past that ruined her relationship with George, but Tanner is still in the dark. Louise knows what happened (that she stole Jules from her abusive father as a baby), but her thoughts on the page are obfuscated; she ruminates on the events of the past without diving into any concrete detail. In an example of backshadowing, the narrative conveys that the letter Louise receives from George troubles her, and the contents of the letter are described as “life-changing,” but what George and Louise did is not explained. Pursuit of Adventure will be a theme that permeates the novel, and the stage is set in the opening through Louise’s internal dialogue about the past incident and George. The mystery will unfold over the following chapters, but the sense of unease begins in the first few chapters.
