The Guncle

“THAT’S HOW YOU DO IT!”

This catchphrase from Patrick’s successful sitcom becomes both his ticket to fame and an albatross around his neck. When he tries to have an intimate conversation with his brother in the airport, a fan recognizes him and urges him to say the phrase, not letting up until Patrick gets angry and walks away. Rowley captures the paradox of Hollywood—the fame sought by so many comes with intrusions on one’s privacy and the assumption that an actor is always ready to perform like a trained animal. Patrick often hates the business, and yet, his acting earned him recognition and a prized Golden Globe.

“I turned down a chance to present Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the Emmys two years ago. You want to know why? It was too much of a commitment.”

Patrick often masks his pain commitment-phobia with narcissistic, urbane wit—here, saying no to Greg’s request to take Maisie and Grant for the summer via a joke about the Emmys. Ever since Joe’s death, Patrick has hidden himself behind his work, his charm, and now, behind the walls of his Palm Springs enclave.

“Sara had found a way to live beyond death. ‘She’s half of you and you’re half of her.’”

When Patrick broaches the idea of Maisie and Grant spending the summer with him, Maisie is resistant because she doesn’t want to leave her mother (or the home she associates with her). Responding to this cry for help is Patrick’s first real test, and he intuitively knows the right thing to say: a vague, but comforting, meditation on loss to soothe two anxious and traumatized children.

“He hadn’t really grown up around cousins, but shouldn’t they be forced to be friends?”

Patrick’s assumption that all kids should hang out together by virtue of familial connection demonstrates to Clara his lack of parenting qualifications. However, what Patrick lacks in parenting expertise, he makes up for in empathy. When he realizes that Maisie and Grant don’t have anyone else their age, he immediately sees his isolated younger self in them. This triggers Patrick to defy Clara’s judgment, prompting him to take the kids in spite of himself.

“What they need is some fun. What they need is a change of scenery. What they need is to laugh and be silly and be kids.”

As Patrick and Clara debate parenting styles, Patrick argues that, in the face of their tragic loss, Maisie and Grant need freedom to play rather than be forced into some arbitrary daily structure. There is no one-size-fits-all panacea for loss, but Patrick’s fun-in-the-sun ethos, his pop culture education, and his willingness to eschew structure in lieu of joyful abandon gives his niece and nephew breathing space within their grief.

“One of the advantages of being on an airplane is that we’re disconnected from everything going on beneath us.”

When the kids ask if they can watch YouTube, Patrick is confronted with the generational conundrum of technology—how much to allow? Is he clinging to a romantic notion of the past by insisting that the kids “reflect, read a book maybe, to be with ourselves” (43)? While he eventually relents, allowing Maisie to post videos to YouTube, he does so with trepidation—one that will be slowly dispelled over the course of the summer.

“It’s not the tragedies that kill us; it’s the messes.”

When Grant loses a tooth and worries that the tooth fairy won’t reward him for it, Patrick resorts to his default strategy: an obscure literary reference the kids don’t understand. Here, citing Dorothy Parker is apropos to the moment—Grant’s emotional reaction to the tooth is fueled by the tragedy of his mother’s death—but Patrick’s insight no comfort to a six-year-old who fears the tooth fairy won’t come. Patrick must reconsider his approach as a caregiver—what he thinks should be an effective strategy may not be effective at all.

“Actors are products to the entertainment industry; it’s dehumanizing. They chew you up and spit you out. And that sort of thing sticks with a person.”

Patrick rants about the capricious and cutthroat nature of the show business. His bitterness that the business doesn’t care about people, only about profits, is a cliché that’s undercut by the fact that Patrick actually managed to have a successful TV career. In fact, this vision of an indifferent Hollywood is just an excuse for Patrick to hide away and avoid dealing with the loss of Joe.

“One day I’ll tell you about gay men and body dysmorphia, but not today.”

Patrick discusses issues of his gay identity with ease—something Greg and Sara appreciated when they decided to ask him to take Maisie and Grant in for the summer. Patrick’s honest and forthright approach normalizes sexual orientation as a normal topic for conversation—part of the novel’s take on the validity and value of unconventional family structures.

“Eduardo shouted from the kitchen, ‘I’m making Aperol spritzes!’ 

 Patrick heard it in Grant’s voice—spwitzes—and smiled.”

For the first time, Patrick’s two separate identities—parent and bon vivant—collide. Sharing afternoon cocktails with JED is a staple of his childless, Palm Springs lifestyle, but without warning, the new, domestic side of his identity intrudes—and the intrusion is delightful. Parents often claim that raising children is difficult but that the rewards are well worth it. Upon hearing Grant’s baby voice over Eduardo’s, Patrick gets a taste of that parental joy.

“What do we say in this house? Boys can do girl things and girls can do boy things.”

Part of Patrick’s mission over the summer is to move Maisie and Grant away from social gender restrictions. He lets them dress however they want, argues that he could have been either best man or maid of honor at Greg and Sara’s wedding, and, most importantly, honors Maisie’s choice to not wear “girls’ bathing suits” (71). Insistence on gender boundaries can be confusing and traumatic to kids who don’t conform; Patrick’s ease at navigating away from such restrictions helps build trust between him and the kids.

“Live your life to the fullest every single day, because every day is a gift. That’s why people die. To teach us the importance of living.”

Patrick has no parental experience, but his human instincts are often spot on. When Maisie asks why people have to die, Patrick knows just how to respond: Death teaches the living to cherish life and to not take a single day for granted. Later, Patrick later realizes he preaches but has not practiced this bit of wisdom.

“It’s weird having them around. Some of my DNA, mixed with Sara’s. They’re like a shadow of an alternate reality, another life, a heterosexual one, unlived.”

Patrick and John have a candid conversation about the sudden introduction of children into Patrick’s once solitary life. For a long time, Patrick assumed children would never be in the cards for him after Joe’s death. Moreover, to some degree, he still identifies parenthood as a heterosexual institution. However, JED’s desire for kids and his time with Maisie and Grant make him rethink these assumptions.

“We’re hyper-connected, but at the same time desperately lonely. We’re overstimulated by bright lights in our face all the time and the promise of more and more content, more and more people to follow, but we’re also numb, scrolling and scrolling past images we don’t take the time to recognize, or a form a cognizant thought about what they’re saying.”

The dangers and benefits of technology is a theme running through the narrative. The kids’ obsession with YouTube alarms Patrick, despite the fact that he owes his career to a different kind of technology. He has a point: Research has linked too much screen time to isolation, distraction, and depression in kids. Worried for the kids’ mental and emotional health, Patrick believes that at nine and six, Maisie and Grant need a taste of life without a screen.

“But watching a program you were on had a strange effect; it made Patrick nostalgic for experiences he was still in the middle of living.”

Patrick’s feelings about technology draw a distinction between professional acting for the screen and creating content as an influencer—a job he looks down on. Yet he admits that seeing himself on TV is also destabilizing, making him feel like a “ghostly version of himself” (123). If television can have this effect on a self-aware adult, he reasons, what could social media be doing to children?

“I was on the lot for a meeting the other day and I went by our soundstage and they totally painted over where we signed our names on the back wall! Everything’s been undone. It’s like we were never even there!”

One of Patrick’s former co-stars, Daisy, bemoans the fact that the soundstage where they filmed The People Upstairs has been reconfigured for a new show, seeing in this transformation the fragility and disposability of Hollywood careers. Just as actors are disposable, so are the physical surroundings that gave their characters life.

“For a rare moment he liked who he was. He liked who he was with them. Not so much a guardian but a guard, someone to stand between their fragile selves and anything else that dared threaten them.”

When Maisie and Grant co-host Patrick’s party, this familial inclusivity acclimates him to the role of parent—the kids’ presence makes him feel complete.

“It’s nice, the stars. They make me feel unimportant. In a good way. Like my problems don’t matter.”

Stars are a recurring symbol in the story. When Patrick and Emory gaze at the night sky, Patrick finds his insignificance in the face of the vast cosmos comforting rather than terrifying. Later, when he and the kids see a meteor burn brilliantly in the atmosphere, he chooses to interpret it as a message from Sara. Patrick has come to a place of spiritual peace, a peace he never got from fame or wealth but from the altruistic act of loving his niece and nephew.

“It was as neat a bookend as this conversation would have.”

When Patrick asks his sister what prompted her visit, Clara abruptly changes the subject, not wanting to share that her marriage is on the verge of ending and her stepchildren are likely out of her life. She needs the presence of children to validate her identity as a mother—especially since she is actually their stepmother, a position that not all view as equivalent. Just like Patrick, Clara also uses avoidance as a coping strategy, moving the conversation into a “neat bookend.”

“Why did he let his sister get to him like this? He’d long ago untethered himself from his family, from everyone. He shouldn’t care this much. But it was the continued suggestion that he was nobody, and the nagging feeling that she was right.”

After Patrick gets angry with Clara for her dismissive and homophobic remark after Joe’s death, he reprimands himself for letting his emotions get the better of him. Undergirding that anger, he realizes, are the unresolved feelings of low self-esteem that pushed him into his acting career to seek audience approval.

“Self-love for gay people can be an act of survival.”

Patrick argues that his narcissism is a necessary survival strategy for gay men, who are so frequently the target of hate and violence. This is one of the few times in the novel when Rowley directly addresses a social issue—here, Patrick is speaking didactically and readers are meant to accept his statement as fact. Through Patrick, Rowley explains behavior many might write off as self-absorbed.

“Patrick and Sara, however, backed slowly away, as if they were in danger of being swallowed—two figures moving slowly backward against the tide of a world spinning forward.”

Recalling one of his and Sara’s biggest fights, Patrick realizes that his anger was at his coming loss: Sara, his closest friend, was marrying his brother, ending the old version of their friendship. Patrick feared he’d be replaced in Sara’s heart by Greg, so he pushed her away first. As they retreated before the vastness of the Grand Canyon, they were backing away from a future they both knew was inevitable.

“Clara chewed on her lip and it scared Patrick, the acceptance, the defeat. Clara spent her life raging for everyone, every person maligned by someone else, but she couldn’t summon the fight for herself?”

When Clara confides that her marriage is ending because of her husband’s affairs, Patrick is unsettled to see her give in without a fight. Patrick expects more outrage from his fierce feminist sister, but Clara is resigned to losing her marriage, her stepchildren, and now, the custody battle for Maisie and Grant. So much of Clara’s identity is tied up in motherhood that losing it drains the fight from her.