52 pages • 1 hour read
Mercedes RonMy Fault
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A 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
Search for Home and Belonging
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes substance use, child abuse, and physical and emotional abuse.
Noah Morgan and Nick Leister’s life together in Los Angeles, California, inspires their respective and overlapping search for home and belonging. Both characters have fraught family and home dynamics that make them feel alienated and alone. When their parents get married and merge their family lives, Noah and Nick are compelled to reimagine what comfort and stability mean to them and discover a new sense of home and belonging with each other.
Noah’s move from Canada to the United States unmoors her and thrusts her into the unknown. After Raffaella Morgan marries William Leister, Noah wishes that she could stay in Toronto with her friends for her senior year of high school. However, because her mother doesn’t want to be apart from her, Noah is forced “to share [her] life with two people [she knows] nothing about” (1). In Los Angeles, not even the Leisters’ palatial house or William and Raffaella’s extravagant gifts can alleviate Noah’s discomfort. The author uses scenic and atmospheric details to illustrate Noah’s desire for comfort and familiarity. Sitting in her new bedroom, Noah longs to “be back in [her] old room with [her] single bed and the same clothes as always” (11). Her new room and walk-in closet filled with designer clothing make her feel as if “nothing [is] real” and that she’s stepped into someone else’s life (11). Being in California makes Noah desperate for connection and safety—she’s “totally alone in a new city with no friends with no one at all” (82). Her initial internal unrest and dislocation leave her feeling disoriented and alone. However, over the course of the novel, Noah’s evolving relationship with Nick helps her to see that home and belonging encompass more than the house where she lives or the people she’s related to. Over time, she discovers that Nick’s love for her can offer her the sense of home and belonging that she is craving.
Like Noah, at the beginning of the novel, Nick feels alone and out of place. Since his dad insisted he move back home and start over, Nick’s life has felt unstable. He and William have a complex relationship because of Nick’s mom’s abandonment and his rebellious past, so living in William’s home challenges Nick’s sense of safety and comfort. When Noah arrives, Nick finds both a friend and a sense of belonging. Their relationship allows Nick to redefine what home means to him—and even inspires him to find his own apartment so that he and Noah can create a future together. In these ways, the novel illustrates how a loving relationship can create home and belonging in unexpected and untraditional ways.
The Relationship Between Love and Hate
In My Fault, author Mercedes Ron explores the intersection of love and hate through the romance genre’s enemies to lovers trope. Noah and Nick’s evolving relationship is a classic example of this trope, and Ron uses it to demonstrate the complex relationship between love and hate, as the characters misunderstand their passionate feelings for each other. When the two protagonists first meet, they treat one another as adversaries. Noah feels as if Nick is exacerbating her alienation and displacement with his cruelty, and Nick feels that Noah is intruding on his family life and his social life. Noah “hate[s] how [Nick] talk[s] to [her]” and “how he look[s] at [her],” convinced that his intense dislike for her will preclude her from adjusting to “all the changes happening in [her] life” (20). Meanwhile, Nick is convinced that Noah’s immaturity and inexperience will worsen his tenuous relationship with his dad, expose his partying lifestyle, and complicate his ability to spend time with his half-sister Madison. With these initial impressions, the characters put themselves at odds, projecting their dislike of their respective situations onto each other. Their preconceptions and first impressions of each other foster hostility and cause them to see their instant and intense reaction to each other as hate.
Over time, however, Noah and Nick realize that their dislike for one another is actually a sign of their interest in each other. Neither of them is good at communicating their feelings, and so it takes weeks for them to open up to each other. However, their physical attraction is strong early on and compels them into an intimate relationship that lacks clear parameters. Once they start engaging in sexual intimacy, they become more curious about one another’s internal worlds and begin to wonder about the potential for a relationship. For example, even though Nick is convinced that Noah is “the girlfriend type” and that he’s incapable of “a monogamous relationship,” he can’t deny that Noah “attract[s] [him] more than any other girl” (175). Noah similarly struggles to make sense of why she enjoys being intimate with Nick when she feels so frustrated with him otherwise. Over time, their seemingly contradictory feelings end up drawing Noah and Nick together. With this unexpected shift in their relationship dynamic, Ron suggests that love and hatred often manifest in similar ways. Nick and Noah confuse their mutual attraction for repulsion but gradually realize that these intense emotions are inspired by curiosity, intrigue, and lust. The more time they spend together, the more complex their intimacy becomes. The novel’s primary plot line traces this shift, in which Nick and Noah go “from hating [each other] to feeling” intense love for and devotion to each other (285). The trajectory of their relationship illustrates how love might be mistaken for hate because both emotions are intense and passionate, explaining how Noah and Nick mistook one for the other.
Overcoming Past Trauma
Although Noah and Nick are very different characters, their romantic relationship helps them each overcome past trauma and embrace growth and change. At the beginning of the novel, they see each other as enemies and are convinced that they’re too dissimilar to get along. Unbeknownst to them, their traumatic pasts create parallels between their experiences, connecting them in ways that they don’t at first understand. Over time, however, their difficult personal histories draw them together. Once they learn how to be vulnerable with each other, they discover that they can help each other to confront their pain, sorrow, and loss, and move beyond it. The novel uses their complex romantic dynamic to show how love and acceptance help them triumph over trauma.
Noah’s traumatic past revolves around her fraught relationship with her abusive father. Throughout the novel, Noah tamps down reminders of her dad and his abuse out of self-preservation. She sleeps with the light on, avoids looking at her scar in the mirror, and refuses to talk to anyone about her childhood, all defense mechanisms that she uses to compartmentalize her trauma and maintain nominal stability in her present life. She is guarded and reserved, particularly around Nick, because she’s afraid of him seeing her vulnerability. She has learned to “ke[ep] [her] demons in check” because the “mere thought of [opening up to Nick] makes her panic (163). However, when she and Nick start to confide in each other, Noah realizes that there are “things that [she] [i]sn’t going to be able to hide”: “I hardly knew him, and already, he was unearthing things I never let anyone see” (163). Although this vulnerability scares her, Nick has a positive impact on Noah’s healing journey, showing genuine concern and support for her as she reveals her story. As soon as she does, Noah discovers the love and acceptance she’s longed for. With Noah’s example, the novel suggests that healing happens through vulnerability and sharing, as she opens herself to the love she needs.
Noah also helps Nick to heal from his traumatic past, rooted in his mother’s abandonment. After she left William and Nick, Nick’s sorrow “soon turned to hatred toward [his] mother and women in general” (133). Ever since, Nick hasn’t trusted women, connecting with them only for sexual pleasure. He has also learned to resort to violence to express his sadness, fear, and anger. With Noah’s help, Nick begins to soften, revealing his close relationship with Madison, the only healthy relationship he has with a girl. Noah shows him that love can be gentle and kind, and that self-expression can happen via conversation instead of fighting. In these ways, Noah and Nick heal each other, acting as one another’s guides as they journey out of sorrow and fear and toward redemption and renewal.
