55 pages • 1 hour read
Jojo MoyesSomeone Else's Shoes
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.
Background
Authorial Context: Jojo Moyes
Jojo Moyes began her career as a journalist in 1993 and started publishing novels in 2002. She is known for her bestselling romance novels, for which she has received public acclaim and multiple awards. One of her most popular novels, Me Before You, has two sequels (After You and Still Me) and was adapted into a movie in 2016, with Moyes as the screenwriter. Like the heroines of Someone Else’s Shoes, Moyes is a wife and mother who lives in the United Kingdom. Someone Else’s Shoes is Moyes’s 17th novel and follows her common theme of exploring serious social issues while utilizing humor and happy endings to resolve the plot. Although she is primarily known for her romance writing, Moyes also explores other genres and subgenres such as historical fiction with novels like The Giver of Stars (2019) and The Last Letter From Your Lover (2010), and she continues to publish journalistic pieces as well. While Someone Else’s Shoes does contain an element of romance, the novel addresses socially relevant topics that are designed to attract a much wider readership. As this novel was written after Moyes first rose to prominence as an author, Someone Else’s Shoes represents an experimental departure from the trend of her previous works, as it introduces new themes such as the various reactions that women have to the aging process, especially as public perception of a woman’s status and credibility shifts with her age. Moyes’s novels also mostly take place in Britain, often in 21st-century London, where the many social divisions of class are especially prominent.
Literary Context: Trading Places
Someone Else’s Shoes reinvents the common plot device of two characters trading circumstances with one another and experiencing the essence of each other’s daily lives. This trope has a rich literary history and has been used in classic works such as William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and remains common in modern media, including in movies like The Parent Trap and The Holiday. In this trope, two protagonists from very different backgrounds switch lives or circumstances either consciously or unconsciously. This trope typically demonstrates both serious and comedic elements, as the nature of the switch itself is often farcical, but a more serious overtone often develops as the characters are forced to learn from one another and find a balance between their disparate approaches to life. In Someone Else’s Shoes, Sam and Nisha must accordingly use what they learn to combat their own negative personality traits, and they ultimately gain a wealth of new experiences by following the titular aphorism of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. In accordance with Moyes’s faithful representation of this common plot structure, she also makes sure to pen characters who contrast even more dramatically than the protagonists of such stories usually do, for although Sam and Nisha are described as looking somewhat alike, their very different approaches to their surroundings and circumstances also mark them as belonging to entirely different segments of society, and the lessons that they learn from each other’s lives occur not just separately but also when their circumstances collide and interweave to bring about the climax of the primary conflict in the story. Ultimately, wearing Nisha’s shoes gives Sam Nisha’s trademark confidence, and walking in Sam’s shoes humbles Nisha enough to help her to understand what is really important in life.
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