72 pages • 2 hours read
Nina LaCourWe Are Okay
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Ocean
The ocean is a powerful presence in the novel, both symbolically and literally. LaCour depicts it as beautiful and wild, but also dangerous and very deadly. Though it takes both Marin’s mother and grandfather from her, it also represents home and belonging, as well as a point of connection to her mother. Where another person may visit their mother’s grave, Marin visits the ocean and the beach where they scattered her mother’s ashes. Its presence in her mind and life rises above ideas of good or bad. Though some of the worst things in Marin’s life have come at the hands of the ocean—and specifically Ocean Beach—some of her best memories have taken place there was well.
One such formative experience was Marin and Mabel’s late-night trip to the beach, during which they became sexually intimate for the first time: “We were miraculous. We were beach creatures. We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin” (113). There are a number of times where Marin seems to suggest that the ocean requires special knowledge to survive. This often comes up when friends of her late mother are talking to her—for example, one of the surfers, Emily, says of Gramps’s habit of walking the surf, “I know I don’t need to tell you this […] But it can be dangerous out here. Even just walking” (62). Emily, too, tells a story of many surfers leaving the waves in a show of respect to allow Gramps the whole beach to surf alone. Additionally, when the police tell Marin that witnesses saw “an old man going into the water at Ocean Beach,” Marin thinks, “I already knew it, I guess. How easily the ocean must have swept him away” (172). Later, when Marin confesses to Mabel that she wonders if Gramps is still alive due to the lack of a body, Mabel is firm. Marin suggests that the waves and tide should have brought the body back. Mabel says, “Yes. And currents that pull things under and send them far out. And rocks to get snagged on, and predators” (177).
Despite this awareness of how dangerous the ocean can be, the novel demonstrates a sort of awe and love for its power. When Marin thinks of her mother’s death, she does so with an awareness of the strange relationship the surfers have with the ocean: “I guess when you spend a life riding waves—knowing that the ocean is heartless and millions of times stronger than you are […] you become indebted to the people who don’t make it” (30). This insight of Marin’s suggests that, while the ocean will take lives, those lives serve as sacrifices to its power.
The symbolic value of water extends beyond the ocean and into other aspects of Marin’s life: the calming influence of swimming in the school pool; the fear of haunting that is expressed in the water pipes of the motel; and the cleansing and recuperative powers of water both after Marin arrives at the dorms and after Marin and Mabel experience the freezing temperatures outside. Water—and particularly the water of the ocean—appears to perform transformative work throughout the novel.
Literary Analysis
Throughout the text, LaCour emphasizes Marin’s precocious affinity for literary analysis. She enjoys the ambiguity and possibility afforded by reading a complex text and developing possible interpretations for the works. This continues, too, in the analysis she and Mabel perform on Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas painting. When Marin and her classmates are tasked with finding evidence to support two conflicting interpretations of The Turn of the Screw, Marin’s agile mind produces a third. Too, Marin’s discussion of One Hundred Years of Solitude with the driver demonstrates her talent for approaching texts from a variety of angles. It is notable, then, that Marin drops her Literature major and is considering a switch to Natural Sciences. Mabel’s surprised and somewhat outraged response is a good indicator of how deeply ingrained Marin’s love for literature and reading really is. The appeal of the Natural Sciences is more understandable when one considers the passage in Chapter 2; Hannah reads her science textbooks to Marin, who finds a sense of place and perspective in the concrete facts and structured approach to the discipline.
Marin’s distancing from the literary practice she’d loved for so long reflects the painfully ambiguous and unknowable truths she’s had to confront recently. Though she spends much of the book hesitantly approaching—and rapidly backing away from—the ambiguity of her grandfather and her own life history, she is not comforted by the possibilities that unfold from her limited knowledge. Her desire for an academic subject that is more knowable and concrete mirrors her need to know and understand her grandfather. Interesting, too, is the recurring reference to Jane Eyre. Jane is a character with whom Marin can identify, despite the superficial differences in their experiences. In Chapter 5, Marin thinks, “Jane Eyre made my heart swell. Jane was so lonely. She was so strong and sincere and honest” (53). There are other points where Marin expresses an identification with Jane (117, 131, 230), but one of the most significant is Marin’s analysis of the novel in Chapter 30, in which Mr. Rochester mirrors Gramps:
She isn’t sure if she should trust [Mr. Rochester] or fear him. The answer is both. There’s so much he hasn’t told her yet. There’s that wife of his, locked up in the attic. There are so many lies of omission. There’s the trick he’s going to play on her, the way he’ll pretend to be someone else and snake his way into her heart. He’ll scare her. She’ll be right to be afraid (228).
Despite Marin’s pain when confronting the ambiguity of her own life, her analysis in the final chapter shows that she’s once again able to enjoy both analyzing and identifying with literary characters. This analysis occurs in the final chapter, during which Marin begins to truly heal from her anger and grief. Grief-stricken and paralyzed by not having answers about her grandfather, Marin sought out types of knowing that were more structured. Her ability to pick up, even partially, her creative and interpretive intellect is another signal that she’s begun to heal.
Weather and Environment
Setting plays an important role in this novel. The narrative is split cleanly between the past and the present and between New York and California. Much of this has to do with the extent of the physical distance Marin is able to place between herself and her home, but the change in location also reinforces how out of place Marin feels in her new life—not just as a person who has moved, but as a person who has experienced loss to a degree that she has been fundamentally changed.
The descriptions of California have a very different tone from those of New York. In New York, Marin has experienced only loneliness and loss; her memories of California, while painful, are usually saturated with a comfort and familiarity. This is due to geography but also due to the physical environments. Marin’s first observation about New York is the heat: “it swallowed me up […]. All my life, hot days came with cooler breezes, but even with the sun setting, the air was thick and relentless” (181). Most of New York’s presence in the novel, however, takes the form of the punishing winter storm that descends upon the girls during Mabel’s visit. Marin says, “I understand what a New York winter storm is now. We are safely inside my room, but outside snow pours—not drifts—from the sky. The ground is disappearing. No more roads, no more paths” (89). The alien nature of the state is clear, too, in early descriptions of the snow: “I make a crushed ice trail from the dorm lobby, thankful for Hannah’s spare pair of boots, which are only a tiny bit small and which she forced on me when the first snow fell (‘You have no idea,’ she told me)” (11); “Snow is halfway up our calves, and we aren’t wearing the right pants for that. It seeps through. It hurts. Mabel’s shoes are thin leather boots, made for city streets in California. They’ll be drenched by the time we make it to the door, probably ruined” (138). Mabel and Marin are ill-equipped to handle themselves in this weather, and they struggle to find comfort in the new environment just as they struggle to find their footing in this new version of their relationship.
The snowstorm is described as obscuring several times, too, mirroring Marin’s mental state and difficulty communicating (15, 89, 100, 186, 213). The rapidly falling snow quickly and thoroughly covers the details of the campus with a thick white layer. This is not unlike the dampening layer of Marin’s grief that has obscured so much of her self and her experience. The snow-covered campus, already only a little familiar to Marin, is a powerful metaphor for the state of her mind. She is aware, in some moments, of the alienation she feels, noting early in the novel, “Things I need: The California sunshine. A more convincing smile” (2). LaCour constructs two, possibly quite different, versions of Marin: the California Marin and the New York Marin. The purpose of this becomes clear early in the novel, when Marin attempts to begin a meditation practice by remembering and visualizing a memory of embracing a redwood tree: “ But I don’t trust my mind to stay in that redwood grove, and right now, outside and covered in snow, are trees I’ve never wrapped my arms around. In this place, my history only goes back three months. I’ll start here” (6).
Environment is more than a framing or narrative device in the novel, rising to a level of symbolism that powerfully articulates Marin’s mental state. From the living energy of the ocean in California to the stifling air and obscuring snow in New York, Marin’s movement from happiness to grief is reinforced by her movement from one coast to another.
