55 pages • 1 hour read
Darcey BellA Simple Favor
Fiction | Novel | Adult | 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.
Themes
Societal Expectations of Mothers
To Stephanie, the most important aspect of her identity is that she is, first and foremost, a mother. Her life revolves around Miles and, at the beginning of the novel, Stephanie’s blog is specifically aimed at mothers. She says that she began it because she felt alone and wanted to reach out to other mothers who felt the same. Part of what makes her feel alone is the pressure she feels as a mother to do everything right. One topic that Stephanie touches on often in her blog is what’s expected of mothers—who they should be and what they should do.
Stephanie understands how this criticism becomes internalized, and mothers begin to judge themselves, always feeling as if they are doing wrong, or not doing enough, or as if everything is their fault. Right at the beginning of the novel, when Emily doesn’t come home, Stephanie nearly manages to convince herself that “the whole misunderstanding is [her] fault” (25). As she says on her blog, “Nothing is easier than convincing a mom that something’s her fault. Even when it isn’t. Especially when it isn’t” (25). Although Stephanie knows that Emily said nothing about being away overnight, her instinct is still to believe that somehow it is her fault for not knowing.
Further, she understands that mothers frequently blame themselves. When Chris appears at Stephanie’s father’s funeral, her mother apologizes for not inviting him even though she didn’t know that he existed. Stephanie, who is not yet a mother, doesn’t understand: “Why was Mom apologizing? Because she always did, just like women are supposed to. Everything is always our fault” (38). Even Emily and Eve’s mother anticipates the accusations when she is talking about her daughters: “It wasn’t my fault. They’re born the way they are. There’s not much you can do to change that. Every parent knows that” (217). By using both Stephanie and Emily’s mothers as examples, Bell illustrates that this phenomenon crosses generations of mothers.
However, Stephanie also talks about how the “mom community” polices each other. She notices how the other mothers at the school judge Emily for working full-time. It is the same judgment she feels she might incur when she starts eating meat again: “I could never blog about this. Never. The moms would never forgive me. They need to think of me as a loving mother who would never want an animal to be hurt for my sake but who isn’t so rigid that I won’t make hamburgers if that’s all the kids will eat” (77). Stephanie knows that she walks a fine line on her blog, and this shows in the way that she strictly monitors the truths she reveals on her blog. She does this because she is well aware of the standards to which society holds mothers, and to which mothers hold each other and themselves.
Living a Double Life
A Simple Favor is a novel where nothing and no one are what they seem. Every character is living a double life, with a separation between the person they present to the world, and their true, inner self. Stephanie, Emily, and Sean are all living double lives, and, over the course of the novel, these dualities come to light and shape the action of the novel.
Stephanie’s duality is illustrated through the contrast between her blog posts and her inner thoughts and feelings, as well as actual events in her history. The version of herself that she presents on her blog is carefully constructed. While not completely inauthentic, she shades events differently, leaving out the real information of her life. For example, in Chapter 17, Stephanie blogs about Davis’s and Chris’s death but in Chapter 18 refutes her own story, beginning the chapter by saying, “What happened was nothing like that” (108). As Stephanie’s life becomes messier and more complicated, she stops blogging for a time, unable to reconcile the reality of her life with the version she presents.
Of these three characters, Emily leads the most blatantly double life—in her case, she also enjoys the duplicity. She keeps Eve, her twin, a secret from everyone, even Sean, for no other reason than she wants to. As Emily thinks of it, “We have to have secrets. We need them to live in the world” (159). To Emily, who controls information for a living, secrets hold power and offer control. Bell reinforces the idea that Emily enjoys her double life through her love of noir works like Double Indemnity and Patricia Highsmith’s novel Those Who Walk Away. While Stephanie’s double life is a condition of her online success, Emily has always kept secrets, even from the closest people in her life.
Even Sean is living a double life; although he seems a willing participant in Emily’s insurance fraud plan, he is only going along with her because he thinks it will never happen. He also admits, “I was afraid of my wife” (254). When he gets involved with Stephanie, it seems as if he is invested in their relationship—after all, he invites her and Miles to move into his home. However, after their relationship ends, Sean admits, “I don’t love Stephanie. I never have and I never will” (258). He adds, “I didn’t mind not having Stephanie around force-feeding me and Nicky her nourishing meals” (303). This stark disparity shows that even Sean, with whom the narrative spends very little time, is living a double life. With his duplicity, Bell suggests that everyone lives a double life to some extent, vacillating between their inner life and the person they show the world.
The Allure of What’s Forbidden
Although Stephanie and Emily seem as if they couldn’t be more different, underneath, they are more alike than either of them knows. Both women revel in what’s forbidden, and both fully acknowledge it; in fact, illicit or forbidden acts offer them more excitement than anything else in their lives.
For Stephanie, knowing that something is wrong or inappropriate makes that thing more attractive. The first time the reader sees this inclination in Stephanie is when she reveals her affair with her half-brother, Chris. Although she immediately finds him physically attractive, his being her father’s unknown son tips her attraction into action. When Stephanie meets Davis, she is attracted to him because of his distance from the sordidness of her relationship with Chris. To her, “He seemed to live in a bright, shiny world where people did the right things and didn’t have sex with their half-brothers” (113). However, her marriage, and even Miles’s birth, doesn’t stop the affair; according to Stephanie, “it had only driven us further underground, where the air was closer and steamier and hotter” (118). Contrary to her hope that she will settle down once married to Davis, the affair doesn’t stop until the car accident takes Chris’s life.
In the aftermath of Davis’s and Chris’s deaths, Stephanie swears, “No more men. No more bad choices” (122). However, this resolution lasts only until she meets Sean. Although Stephanie hadn’t liked Sean at first, after Emily disappears, when she sees him for the first time, she notes, “Sean was so much taller and better looking and more attractive than I remembered” (55). Once again, Stephanie feels, “that same jolt of attraction to someone inappropriate. Someone very inappropriate. That tingle of pure excitement” (56). Although Stephanie knows what she is doing is socially unacceptable, she can’t resist the excitement of it for that very reason.
Emily feels that same attraction to wrongdoing; she compares it to “the tingly nausea jitters you get just before the roller coaster drops” (155). She also admits in the very next sentence, “Some people will do anything for that feeling. And as the song goes, God, I know I’m one” (155). Emily’s need for excitement, and the fulfillment she gets from being bad, is illustrated first by her theft of Sean’s mother’s sapphire ring. By stealing the ring and then revealing it to Sean, she both fulfills her own needs and binds Sean to the theft, increasing her excitement and sense of control and power. Her plan to defraud the insurance company comes from the same place and reaches its peak with Mr. Prager’s murder. As Emily is describing how they will dispose of Prager’s body, Stephanie observes, “Emily’s breathing has sped up, and she looked flushed, excited. If I saw her from a distance and didn’t know what she was talking about, I’d think, What a happy woman!” (289) Emily is most happy, and most fulfilled, when she is crossing moral and legal boundaries.
At the end of the novel, both women again vow not to succumb to that need for excitement that can only be fulfilled by doing what’s forbidden. As Emily says, “I promised myself that I would make it work, that I would never get restless again […] For as long as I could” (321). This assertion echoes the one that Stephanie made earlier, after Davis’s and Chris’s deaths, yet by the end of the novel, Emily is already planning to get back at Sean by tormenting him with an unexpected visit. Emily’s plan to ignore her restlessness isn’t going to last long.
