The Chicken Sisters

“And just as instantly, she could see what Amanda apparently was totally clueless about—that a reality show would steamroll their mother and rip the lid off every awful thing about Merinac, their house, their childhood, everything.”

Mae’s concerns regarding the outcome of Food Wars implies that her childhood and mother hold secrets she does not want to be known, and this causes her stress. As someone with closer ties to media and reality television than Amanda, Mae is more aware of The Influence of Reality Television on Personal Narratives. In this moment, Mae highlights Amanda’s naivete, which begins to illustrate the strife between her and her sister. This is also another moment where the narrator creates mystery around the outcome of the competition show.

“Worrying about Nancy was an excellent way to avoid worrying about herself. Amanda always drew chickens when she was upset—those stupid chickens, Mae called them, and Amanda’s art teacher, along with every teacher, agreed—and this year her sketchbook was full of them.”

Amanda continuously diverts her attention from her own needs to those around her, such as Nancy, reflecting her tendency to prioritize familial responsibilities over her personal ambition. However, the decision to lean directly into her artwork illustrates that Amanda does have a passion she wants to pursue, despite being criticized for it. The association of drawing and being upset suggests that it is a soothing activity for her.

“She would have paid any amount of money to hand Ryder off and greet Sabrina gracefully, setting a professional tone for the next few days.”

Contrasting with Amanda’s priorities, this moment illustrates how Mae places her personal ambition over her family. By wishing she could give Ryder to someone else in his time of need, she believes that she has given the wrong impression to Sabrina that she is unprofessional and worries that her future in reality television will suffer. This moment characterizes Mae at the beginning of the novel and leaves room for her to undergo significant character development.

“Amanda felt nothing but dread for the day ahead. She did her chicken and garden chores quickly, feeding the birds, checking their water, dropping the watermelon rinds they loved without taking time to hold one out and laugh at the way they pecked their way right through the red and white down to the green.”

Dell’Antonia incorporates details regarding the daily lives of the characters, such as Amanda’s routine with her chickens, to provide complexity to the characters. As the characters go through their daily lives, they are illustrated as being realistic and familiar. At the same time, Amanda’s feelings of dread and her decision to “quickly” go through her routine demonstrates how Food Wars begins to dismantle the characters’ lives and affect their actions, as well as their comfort.

“Mae dreamed about her mother’s chocolate cream, Amanda loved apple, they would both take a slice of lemon meringue, but Mae hardly dared to request a flavor, let alone a baking lesson. Pies were Barbara’s department, and she accepted no help.”

Throughout the novel, food is used as a tool to bring together the characters and allow them to connect to each other, such as Mae and Amanda’s love for Barbara’s pies. By depicting their differing preferences of pies, Dell’Antonia maintains that the sisters are different, but they share a love for their mother. At the same time, Mae recognizes Barbara must be hiding something from her if she accepts Patrick’s help with baking her pies, so the use of the pies is also a narrative tool for the characters to recognize that something is wrong.

“Carleen’s story wasn’t hers. Amanda had been quite well liked in high school—mostly because she stayed resolutely in the middle of the road, dressing like everyone else, doing the things everyone else did.”

For Amanda, Carleen represents everything she feels she is not, so her comic character allows her to express her desires and reenact how she wishes she behaved in the past. Carleen is a mode of expression for Amanda, just as Mae utilizes her decluttering and organization skills to express herself.

“Just as Mae finished, Barbara, dressed in fresh slacks and a short-sleeve blouse and looking bare without her usual covering smock, walked in […] Barbara took her apron down from the wall and wrapped it around herself, murmuring. ‘Whatever it takes,’ she repeated softly.”

In this moment, Mae recognizes just how much her mother is committed to winning the Food Wars competition, and she also begins to realize Barbara must have more going on behind closed doors than she realizes. This moment begins to shape Barbara’s character further and complicates her as her backstory begins to unravel.

“[I]f she didn’t know how little she deserved to have any man return her interest, since she’d already proved with Frank, back when they were fighting so hard over the life she had wanted so badly, that she didn’t know her own mind or heart.”

Amanda’s internal conflict over her developing relationship with Andy places her odds with herself, because she feels as though she both does not deserve his interest and doesn’t know what she truly wants out of life. In this moment, Amanda reflects on how she has not prioritized her own personal desires, and this causes her to question what she actually wants versus what she believes she wants.

“Mae knew things got around here; her mother didn’t have to teach her that […] Amanda had gone way too far. Way too far. She wasn’t going after Mae anymore but Barbara, and a whole night’s receipts, and she knew good and well that their mother couldn’t afford that.”

Amanda deliberately betrays Barbara and Mae, illustrating how reality television can manipulate the motives of people and make them behave in uncharacteristic ways. By telling John Calvin that Mae was ridiculing his chickens, Amanda’s choice furthers the divide between the restaurants and within the family.

“The Food Wars host wasn’t just a friendly girlfriend, and she didn’t care about kids. She might prefer that Amanda do or say something just because it would make better TV, but nothing kept Amanda more sober, in every sense of the word, than Gus and Frankie.”

Amanda’s ability to worry more over her children’s response to her relationship with Andy furthers her inability to take ownership of her desires. At the same time, this moment represents character development because she can objectively view Sabrina’s intention to create conflict for the purpose of entertainment.

“Up until this moment, Sabrina had pulled off the illusion that Food Wars was something of a shoestring production, just her and her team, but with them all gathered in one place […] it was suddenly clear that this was truly a massive endeavor.”

At this point in the novel, Mae recognizes the intensity of the Food Wars and the show’s influence on personal narratives. With the knowledge that the production team is much larger than she knew, Mae recognizes the scope and power of the show’s impact on her family and begins to divert her priorities away from her own ambitions and find a balance with her familial responsibility. This moment also illustrates the manipulative behavior Sabrina utilizes to create entertainment at the expense of others.

“There was nobody to protect Frannie’s except Amanda, and if everyone just knew, knew what she and Barbara were really like, they would never believe anything Mae or Barbara said, not about this, not about anything.”

Amanda reflects on her feelings for Barbara and Mae, which shows the reader that the rivalry between the restaurants extends much further into the personal relationships of the characters. The sisters and their mother’s differences are reflected in the rivalry between the restaurants, so the show is used as a narrative tool for the characters to express these differences.

“It took just long enough for Mae to feel safe before Sabrina made her move.”

As the opening of Chapter 14, this line reflects how Mae initially believes she could trust Sabrina to not show her mother’s house to the show’s viewers; however, Sabrina capitalizes on Barbara’s hoarding tendencies for entertainment, which creates a moral battle for the characters.

“Everybody’s so willing to call everybody else out. People don’t get into this unless they have something they want out there, Amanda. I never know why, when I first read the e-mails, but you can feel it. Everybody thinks they want fame, or a hundred grand, but what they really want is to tell, to have everybody know that they’re right, they’re the best, their father was wrong all along, whatever. It’s always something, and it makes good TV, and that’s my job.”

Sabrina’s comment to Amanda makes it clear that she not only can read people and recognize when there is conflict, but that her decision to capitalize off of it stems from people’s need for validation. Dell’Antonia’s decision to portray a reality television show in her novel allows her to explore how people react to tension as well as their need to reconcile with their own desires or responsibilities. It also illustrates just how much people are willing to watch these shows not only for entertainment, but to explore the inner lives of others and feel less alone in their experiences.

“Parkinson’s disease. Disease, a disease. Not a death sentence, not one of the many horrors she’d been imagining, but the weight of her mother, her inability to help herself, and her great-aunt’s immediate understanding told Mae that this was big, and not new, and not going away.”

When Mae learns about her mother’s condition, she experiences a shift in her perspective as she reflects on what actually matters in her life; Mae’s understanding of her mother begins to expand as her character develops into prioritizing her family over herself. This moment also allows Mae and Barbara to deepen their relationship with each other.

“Comments about the mouse and the pies and the likelihood that anyone who lived like that could run a clean restaurant should have been deeply satisfying […] but Amanda mostly found it unsettling. There was just so much venom. How could people with nothing at stake produce so much passion?”

Amanda’s ability to recognize her own mistakes introduces the character development she makes over the course of the novel. Questioning the motive of her own actions allows her to reflect on the root cause of the situation, and the narrator provides an unbiased view of this. Rather than belittling Amanda for her actions, the narrator creates space for Amanda to look both objectively at Food Wars and herself.

“But she had plans, and they were good plans. Jay would want this; he really would. If he would just hear her out. If they could get that far.”

This moment mirrors the one in Mae’s first chapter where she tells Jay about her plans to go to Merinac for Food Wars; however, the shift between her first plan to this one considers her other family members and how it will benefit them. The plans she has in mind refer to her idea to merge the businesses and stay in Kansas, but since the reader does not know this yet, the narrator creates suspense and mystery. The narrative hints that Mae’s new plan will invoke an argument between her and Jay, but Dell’Antonia instead utilizes this moment to begin to illustrate Mae’s character development.

“Maybe the tree didn’t make a noise. Maybe nothing ever made a noise. Maybe nobody ever heard anything unless it was broadcast to the entire world, which meant that Amanda’s whole life now amounted to about an hour of bad behavior and the failed one-night stand she didn’t have with the only guy she’d even thought about since Frank, a guy who now thought she was not just needy and desperate but a liar and a thief.”

As Amanda reflects on what’s left of the tree at Barbara’s house, she likens herself to it and the famous rhetorical question about whether a tree that falls in a forest with no one around truly makes a sound: She questions whether her emotional conflict with her mother and sister would ever have been revealed without the show, and thus the viewers who bear witness to it. The use of noise— albeit the lack thereof—frames this moment to illustrate the internal conflict of the characters, as seen in Amanda: that they do not communicate with those around them. Rather, it took the filming of Food Wars to voice the strife among the family members and prompt them to engage in any conversation with each other, along with their own need to look within themselves to better their relationships and pursue their desires.

“Coming home is helping me figure out which few things are important, and I need to start making sure my life reflects the same simplicity and clarity I love to create in the spaces around me.”

Mae’s commentary on her own internal conflict allows her to take control and ownership of how she avoids her emotions. Rather than concealing her feelings in decluttering physical spaces, she allows the act of cleaning and facing her mother’s hoarding tendencies to figuratively clean her own mind of the past. She reconciles with the shame she has felt for her hometown and family, and part of her character development includes allowing herself to open up to those around her.

“She met Amanda’s eyes and flicked hers towards Mimi’s. She was right, too—it was the only place they could get to without risking someone from Food Wars walking out of Barbara’s, seeing Amanda, and descending on them both.”

By having the sisters make amends inside Mimi’s, Dell’Antonia positions them within the origins of the family rivalry and sets in motion the eventual merger of the businesses. By tackling their issues together inside the restaurant and away from Food Wars, they communicate and express themselves genuinely and without fear of judgment.

“The sign Kenneth had hung to cover Mae’s bad painting job had fallen, breaking the pot of flowers in front of it before coming to rest flat against the boards of the porch, now covered in potting soil and uprooted impatiens.”

The narrative foreshadows the eventual need to create a sign for the Chicken Sisters business. This allows for the sisters to have a fresh start in both their relationships and their businesses. The imagery in this scene, including the broken pot, provides a vivid metaphor reflecting the destructive nature of conflict. Dell’Antonia’s decision to have impatiens “uprooted” in the soil illustrates their need to replant their relationships as well.

“‘You’re not winning,’ Mae said almost automatically. Then she stuck out her tongue, and Amanda had to laugh.”

This moment depicts light-hearted and friendly rivalry between the sisters that is healthy and productive, contrasting greatly with their actions earlier in the novel. They illustrate their ability to forgive each other and begin reestablishing their relationship as sisters.

“When her mother and mother-in-law broke apart, they were both laughing, and Amanda nearly clapped. Nancy might not have told them about the loan right away, but Amanda knew she would have, even if Nancy had doubted herself. It was time for her mother to see who Nancy really was and why Amanda loved her—and maybe why there was room for both Barbara and Nancy in Amanda’s life.”

Although Barbara and Nancy have interacted very little in the past, Dell’Antonia utilizes this image to create solidarity and friendship between two women as mothers and business owners. Amanda’s love for them both illustrates the ability to have both of these women in her life as mother figures who have helped raise her. It also illustrates their ability to not only reconcile their differences and acknowledge one another’s pain.