54 pages • 1 hour read
Ashley PostonThe Seven Year Slip
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.
Themes
The Acceptance of Change and Personal Growth
Content Warning: This section features discussions of suicide.
The Seven Year Slip is first and foremost a story about change, an obstacle for both major characters. For most of the story, Clementine has trouble differentiating changes for the worse and personal growth and development. She herself feels stuck in time, much like her Aunt Analea, who resisted change to the point of losing her lover to the passing of time. Some of this resistance to change is ingrained in her personality, and some of it is a result of the death of her aunt, a prominent influence in her life. She is afraid to move into the apartment she inherited because she still sees it as her aunt’s apartment rather than her own. Instead, Clementine seeks out security and stability through her job, ignoring her changing feelings toward it in favor of keeping this part of her life the same.
When she meets Iwan in the present and sees the ways he has changed over seven years, Clementine wants to tell him “I met you in my time, and you’re so different [...] I don’t know why you changed. I don’t know how [...] I don’t know you at all” (146). Though she sees bits of the old Iwan in his new life, Clementine obsesses over everything that has changed about him and paints every change as negative. When she tries to confront him about this, Iwan responds, “Perhaps instead of wanting me to stay the exact same person you met in that apartment, you should let yourself change a little, too” (242).
The main lesson Clementine must learn in the text is that all change isn’t bad. Change and stagnancy are less of a dichotomy than they may at first seem, as Clementine learns when she begins to understand the reasons Iwan has changed and how he has remained the same at his core. This is symbolized by the ways he changes his restaurant after the soft opening. While Clementine criticizes its coldness and formality, Iwan keeps many aspects of it that the old him would not have liked because the new one does. He tells Clementine, “This Hyacinth is me. Not the me from seven years ago, not the press release version of me—but me” (272), showing how he has both changed and stayed the same. Clementine too must accept change toward the end of the novel when she leaves the life she knows in search of happiness. Though the time frame of her character in the novel is seven years shorter than that of Iwan, she still changes as a character throughout these months while keeping the crucial parts of who she is. In the Epilogue, Clementine succinctly summarizes this theme by saying “Nothing stayed—or so I had always thought. Nothing stayed and nothing lingered. But I was wrong [...] Because the things that mattered most never really left. The love stays. The love always stays, and so do we” (280). In this way, Poston explores how love and experience can stay with a person even once they change, and that change can be positive.
Reconciling Passion and Practicality
At the beginning of the novel, Clementine has lost all of her passion for life following the death of her aunt. She often reflects on how Analea had so much passion, saying that she was “the main character in her own story, and she knew it. And, for a part of it, I think she was the main character in mine, too” (87). For much of her life, Clementine wants to emulate Analea, yet her death changes this, and leaves Clementine recoiling from that image of herself, saying “I didn’t want to be anything like her, because I was heartbroken” (225). Clementine’s passion is reignited when she meets Iwan. When Iwan discusses his interest in food, Clementine can see his passion for it and how it drives him. She notes how the “passion in his voice was infectious [...] His joy made my heart ache a little in a way I hadn’t ever felt. Not the sad sort of ache—but a longing for something I’d never experienced before” (68). Though she does not relate to his feelings about creating the perfect meal, she longs to be as interested and invested in something as Iwan is.
The thing that holds Clementine back from pursuing her passions is her fear of change. At Strauss & Adder, she is stuck in a passionless job yet is convinced she needs to stay there for stability. Just as she fears change, Clementine fears what other people will think of her if she were to follow her true passions and leave behind everything that makes her unhappy. When she tells her parents she quit her publishing job, she expects them to think she has given up and is a failure. Clementine cares greatly about what others think of her, and it is not until she starts living for herself at the end of the novel that she can be happy.
Iwan faces the same problem. Like Clementine, he started as someone full of passion, but she sees how the seven years that have passed for him have made him considerate of social expectations. James Ashton appears to Clementine like any other celebrity chef and she misses how uniquely passionate he was about food seven years earlier. However, when they argue about this, Iwan asks her “If I was still that dishwasher, would you be here?” (240) and Clementine sees part of the reason why Iwan has changed. Both Iwan and Clementine have built facades that mask their passion while appealing to social expectations, yet over time both realize that, like change and stagnancy, passion and expectations are not a complete dichotomy. At the end of the novel, both have come to terms with the fact that it is not impossible to do what society expects of them while following their passions, and that sometimes, risks are healthy despite the discomfort they bring.
The Complexities of Grief
Clementine grieves throughout the novel after several major losses in her life, the most notable being the passing of her Aunt Analea. Poston explores the complex emotions that follow a suicide, noting both in the text and its accompanying materials how the mixed emotions that surround it can be inexplicable and different for everyone. Though she loves and misses her aunt greatly, Clementine is also angry about Analea not considering the pain she would be causing others. She details “the terrible weight of missing her and trying not to blame her all in the same breath,” yet she is also followed by guilt and asks herself, “Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through?” (165).
Clementine’s feelings about her aunt’s suicide become even more complex when she is confronted with pieces of Analea as she lives in Apartment B4 and when she meets Vera. Analea seems to haunt Clementine, yet Clementine refuses to fully mourn her aunt, making her grief unmanageable. Clementine describes her mourning process, saying that the permission she thought she gave herself to do so “hadn’t been permission to cry—it had been a command to be strong. To be okay. I told myself, over and over, I had to be okay” (227). Even once Clementine gets the permission she needs to grieve, she understands that her feelings about her aunt will always be complex, describing her grief as “the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she” (261).
Many other forms of grief are present throughout The Seven Year Slip and are often as complex as Clementine’s grief for her aunt. Like Clementine, Iwan is greatly impacted by the death of his grandfather, the person who first got him interested in food. Everything he does at his restaurant is to make his grandfather proud, so much so that it leads him to only act toward this one goal rather than doing anything just for himself. Clementine must mourn the past version of Iwan when she meets James in the present. Though he is still the same person, Clementine fixates on all the ways he has changed, and she wants to tell him, “I don’t know you at all” (146). She thinks she has lost the version of Iwan she once knew and she grieves this, though she later comes to reconcile Iwan’s past with his present and accept all versions of him.
Similarly, despite not wanting to be anything like her aunt after her suicide, Clementine grieves for the woman she was before her aunt died. Leading up to her emotional release with Vera, Clementine connects with her former self and with her aunt in small, manageable ways, such as with watercolors in the bathtub. For most of the novel, she misses her former self but feels that this version of herself, like Analea, is out of reach. Poston shows how grief often accompanies change of any sort and explores how complex emotions can occur unexpectedly while grieving any loss.
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