55 pages • 1 hour read
Alice FeeneyHis & Hers
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Friendship Bracelet
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses sexual assault and emotional abuse.
The red-and-white friendship bracelets made by Anna as a teenager and her mother in the present symbolize toxic relationships throughout the book, encompassing both friend and mother-daughter dynamics. For her 16th birthday, Anna made them for each of the five girls present, distributing them before the traumatic experience that sets the murders in motion years later. In the present, Mrs. Andrews ties one around the tongue of each of the first three murdered girls, simultaneously pointing to the lies and threats related to that night and permanently silencing the women.
The bracelets represent the ties that bind the female characters together. Even when ties have been broken—relationships severed—they leave lasting scars. When Anna rediscovers the bracelet in her jewelry box, she ties it on her wrist, “pulled so tight that it hurts. [She] loosen[s] it a little, and see[s] the angry red groove it has cut into [her] skin” (95). The object has given her a literal wound to match the emotional one. She thinks, “We pretend not to see the scars we give one another, especially those we love. Self-harm is always harder to ignore, but not impossible” (95). Toxic relationships often involve self-harm as well as the injury of others. Mutual dynamics can also complicate the assignment of blame. People can be complicit in mutually destructive relationships, and the victims of abuse often experience associated guilt or shame. Anna anticipates that the “mark on [her] wrist will fade, but the scar on [her] conscience because of what happened the first time [she] wore this bracelet will be there forever” (95). She partly blames herself for the violence she suffered and takes some responsibility for including Catherine in the party and then abandoning her in fear once the group sexual assault began. Because the friendship bracelets symbolize toxic people and events, they are an ironic motif that contributes to the psychological darkness of the novel.
Cameras and Pictures
Both recording equipment and simple point-and-shoot cameras reappear throughout the text, as do the pictures taken with them. The motif indicates the availability of different perspectives and the ways people exert control over one another by deciding what to conceal or reveal. It plays an important role in the development of the theme of Truth, Lies, and Narrative in the text.
Rachel is always taking pictures, which she uses for personal gain and social control. She groomed her friends, sold naked pictures of their bodies, and blackmailed them with nude pictures that show their faces. She also exerts narrative control through pictures. When meeting Anna, Rachel, already planning a certain trajectory for Anna, demands Helen take a picture of them so that they’ll have a “before and after” (130). As an adult, she “doesn’t do a lot of socializing” and has few real friends but “post[s] pictures of herself on Instagram with alarming regularity” (42). Rachel cares less about developing meaningful connections with people than she does about using pictures to craft her public persona.
Perspectives—and pictures—are necessarily partial. Through her job as a reporter, Anna influences the public’s perception of the world. She thinks, “People working in the media today have more power than politicians” (5), and admits that her reluctance to be honest about her own story compromises her reliability as a presenter. A news story and murder investigation that touches on her past heightens this claim about subjective truths. Cat, too, conceals her involvement in the story. Perspective is necessarily limited by time. When Anna visits the house of Cat’s parents, she encounters “a framed picture of […] Fifteen-year-old Catherine Kelly” (232). When she sees this picture near “the glamorous one of Cat Jones” (232), she realizes that they are the same person. By pairing two partial perspectives, pictures of the same person at different times in her life, she sees more of Catherine’s/Cat’s story. However, most of that story is wrong. It is a “frame” job, a scheme named with picture-related vocabulary. Photographs, which can tell only a partial story from a single perspective, are as unreliable as the narrators in the novel.
Cleaning and Contamination
Cleaning as both housekeeping and personal hygiene figures as a motif. It responds to the threat of contamination. The various crime scenes and objects need to be preserved, but one of the main characters always contaminates the evidence. Anna is also germophobic. She carries disinfectant and wipes her hands after meeting people and objects she expects many people have touched. She approaches people as a source of harm.
Cleaning can also be a form of contamination; a cleaned crime scene, for example, has been contaminated because the evidence has been altered or removed. Rachel’s makeovers or physical grooming of her friends also resulted in contamination because she was preparing them to be sexually used and assaulted. Mrs. Andrews’s former occupation as a housecleaner plays a role in her scheme. She uses a dirty home to further the illusion of dementia and lets herself into the homes of her one-time clients with keys gained as their cleaner. She even cleans while there. Right before Jack finds Zoe dead in their bathroom, he observes, “Toddlers are experts at creating mess, but all the clutter and chaos I’ve grown used to has been tidied away and put back in its place. Everything feels wrong” (200). The crime scene and Mrs. Andrews’s presence in the house are marked by excessive order rather than violent disorder. The motifs of cleaning and contamination, and the blurred line between them, contribute to the novel’s tone of unease.
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