The Other Mrs.

“On the surface there’s nothing not to like. But I know better than to take things at face value. It doesn’t help that the day, like the house, is gray. If the sun were out maybe I’d feel differently.”

This simple quote holds the key to the entire novel: Never take things at face value. It provides a way to interpret events, even when Sadie herself so often jumps to conclusions and misinterprets things. It is also an example of foreshadowing, a warning of future events. Foreshadowing is a common literary device used in psychological thrillers.

“I wonder now, and not for the first time this week, what kind of disastrous effect this change will have on our family. It can’t possibly be the fresh start Will so auspiciously believes it to be.”

This quote closes Sadie’s first entry, and the word “disastrous” underscores the sense of foreboding. Sadie’s uncertainty is also highlighted (she has “wondered” more than once), as well as her difference from Will, who seems to be more optimistic about the future.

“At first, when we’d learned of our inheritance, I suggested to Will that we sell the home, bring Imogen to Chicago to live with us, but after what happened in Chicago—not just the affair alone, but all of it, everything—it was our chance to make a new beginning, a fresh start. Or so Will said.”

Sadie’s reluctance to move from Chicago is clear in this quote. Will’s phrase “fresh start” is a motif and something that Sadie repeats when she is trying to convince herself that they have done the right thing by relocating to Maine. The use of the words “all of it” and “everything” tells the reader that there are still secrets being withheld, adding to the mystery.

“There is Will. Always the voice of reason in our marriage.”

While on the surface, Sadie could simply be stating what she believes to be true at the time, this statement is an example of literary irony. Will is initially presented as a truth-teller but turns out to be a master manipulator, taking advantage of Sadie’s DID to benefit himself. He convinces Camille to murder him, gaslights Sadie, and commits murder himself.

“Because they lived at the top of the hill, Will and I often speculated that their views of the sea were splendid, three hundred sixty degrees of our little island and the ocean that walls us in.

And then one day Will slipped and told me that they were. The views. Splendid.”

Although they are experiencing difficulties in their marriage, Will and Sadie are still functioning as a couple, which is seen in their speculations here. Sadie’s feelings about living on the island seep into this quote when she describes the ocean as walling them in as if they are trapped or imprisoned. This stands in contrast to the idea of ocean views as luxurious. The last part of the quote is revealing because of the word “slipped” and the fragmented sentence structure. “Slipped” suggests that Will made a mistake and revealed something he was hiding; he had to have been in the house to know that the views were splendid. The sentence fragments in the last part of the quote suggest that Sadie is angry or having difficulty finishing the thought.

“I’d made it easy on her, inviting him to that party. I always made things easy for Sadie.

If it wasn’t for me, they never would’ve met. He was mine before he was hers. She forgets that all the time.”

While Camille and Sadie seem unlikely roommates, it is clear that they have an intimate relationship. Camille borrows Sadie’s clothes (and says she looks better in them than the larger Sadie “with her broad shoulders and her thick hips” (42)) and uses Sadie’s credit card without her permission. While Sadie thinks Camille is often up to no good, Camille complains that she “always made things easy for Sadie” (43). There are traces here that suggests this is not a typical roommate relationship but something more intimate and troubling. The last line about Sadie forgetting all the time signals Sadie’s recurring memory loss, a common symptom of DID.

“I let myself believe him because it’s the only way I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

This quote occurs after Sadie discovers the violent drawings and the murder staged in the dollhouse in the attic. She feels unsafe in her home, just like she felt unsafe while sharing an apartment with Camille. Will gaslights her by suggesting that Otto is responsible for the violent images, making her doubt her concern about Imogen’s behavior. Focusing attention on the vacant house next door is a clue, but Sadie’s understanding is still incomplete. Saying that she “let” herself believe him suggests that she may be (or is becoming) aware that Will doesn’t always speak the truth.

“Our time spent together, no matter how good or bad it may have been, came with the realization that he would never know me as he knew Sadie. Because what the other woman gets is another woman’s table scraps, never the full meal.”

While Camille usually dismisses Sadie as less attractive and unable to satisfy Will sexually, she is unusually introspective here. She realizes that she is the “other woman” in this relationship, the mistress with whom he is having an affair rather than the wife with whom he is building a family and a future. She lives around the edges of his life, and she is getting Sadie’s scraps. The title of the novel, however, suggests that this relationship is more complicated and that Camille is the “other Mrs.” rather than simply the “other woman.”

“And then suddenly I was no longer in the bed. I was standing beside it, watching myself sleep. The room around me became distorted. The colors began to fade. All at once, everything was monochrome. The walls of the room warped to odd shapes, trapezoids and parallelograms. It was no longer square.”

This is the first detailed description of Sadie losing her sense of self and reality, but because it is presented in a dream, she is given plausible deniability that this is really happening. The disorientation here is visual and physical, as the room loses its normal colors and shape. The event leaves Sadie feeling physically ill with a headache. Dreams are commonly used in literature as prophecies, foreshadowing, revelations, symbols, or to stoke fear or mystery. Here, the dream reveals that something is not right with Sadie, though this use of generalized mental-health symptoms is problematic. This scene describes depersonalization, or an out-of-body experience, which is more often found with depersonalization/derealization disorder.

“Don’t you look lovely, Mrs. Foust, I said to my reflection, though I’d always been so much prettier than Sadie. But even so, if I wanted to, I could do my hair like hers, I could dress like her, pass myself off as Mrs. Foust. Persuade others to believe that I was Will’s wife, his chosen one. If I wanted to.”

While Sadie and Camille are both aware of one another as individuals, Sadie seems to constantly emphasize their differences while Camille grows increasingly aware of their similarities. Camille is the woman with whom Will is having an affair, but she is also the same person, if not persona, as Sadie. In DID, not all alters are mutually aware, and even though both women know of the other’s existence, Camille seems to be the closest to acknowledging or realizing they are alters. While both Sadie and Camille live in the present, Mouse seems completely separate and stuck in the time of her trauma.

“I was gone before he came back. He never knew I was there.”

This short quote is ironic on several levels. Camille does not leave in a physical sense, and she does not fool Will, as he is aware that she is Sadie’s alter. This may be an example of dramatic irony if the reader has figured this out too. While Sadie is the persona most present in the novel, she is also much less in control of when the other alters appear. She has no or little memory of her actions when Mouse or Camille are in control. Sadie claims that she has a bad memory or that she has inexplicably lost time when she finds herself in strange situations, like playing on the floor with a child at her clinic. Camille believes herself to be in control, choosing when to engage and when to leave. She also believes that she is powerful, able to manipulate both Sadie and Will. However, Will is the puppet master, manipulating both Sadie and Camille.

“It’s then that he snaps and calls me a liar. ‘Mommy is a liar!’ is what he screams, taking my breath away. He says, ‘Yes, you do!’ as his crocodile tears turn to real tears. ‘You do know what it is, you liar.”

The word “lie” is something Sadie uses somewhat loosely in the novel—for example, in connection to her son Otto bringing a knife to school. In many instances, her first instinct is to lie; she lies to Imogen and the nurse at the clinic. Here, her continual denial of what her son Tate knows to be true, that she has played the statue game with him, causes him to label her a liar. Her description of his initial tears as “crocodile tears” suggest that she believes he is being manipulative. Deception and denial are key to many of the characters’ behaviors in the story, but here we can see the price that is paid by the innocent bystanders.

“‘If you help me, I will do everything I can to help you.

He says, ‘The truth.’

But I’ve already told him the truth. ‘I’ve been nothing but honest with you,’ I say.

“You’re certain of that?’ he asks.

I tell him I am. He stares awhile.

And then, in time, he tips his hat at me and he leaves.”

This quote taps into one of the major themes of the novel: secrets and lies, or in this case, the importance of being honest and telling the truth. While Officer Berg may not realize the truth about Sadie’s DID, he does realize that she is concealing information from him and that she is not being entirely truthful. While it is generally frowned upon to lie to the police, he seems to genuinely want to help Sadie. However, he is unable to do so if she does not tell him the whole truth. The problem is, of course, that she doesn’t know the whole truth.

“I know this voice. These days, I hear it nearly every time I close my eyes.

‘I’m not sorry for what I did.’”

This is one of a few instances in the novel when Sadie has auditory hallucinations or hears voices. This happens earlier when she goes for a jog but rationalizes that it was the wind, not a voice menacing her. In this instance, it is not clear if the voice is inside or outside her head, but it is a voice that she knows well and hears frequently, presumably Camille’s. This is a problematic depiction of Sadie’s mental-health condition because it confuses symptoms of DID with schizophrenia, a common mistake in film and literature.

“It isn’t with forethought that I let myself into the Jeep. The thought didn’t cross my mind until I was standing beside the car with the keys in my hand. But it would be ludicrous not to act on this. Because what this is is destiny. A series of events outside of my control.”

Sadie, here and elsewhere in the novel, grasps for ways to understand her behavior or decisions—or those made by her alters. In feeling like her life is out of her control—which, in many ways, it is—she seeks a justification for her behavior. She has just stolen the keys from Courtney’s office, broken into her car, and located her house on the GPS, which she plans on breaking into next. This is criminal behavior for which there is no ethical justification, but claiming that it is “destiny” gives her actions a predetermined and even higher justification.

“I’ve dreamed of this room. I dreamed of myself lying in this bed, or a bed similar to this, hot and sweating beneath that fan, in the crevasse that is still in the center of the bed. I stared at the fan, willed it to move, to push a gust of cold air onto my hot body. But it didn’t because the next thing I knew I was standing beside the bed watching myself sleep.”

This is one of several moments of transition from one alter to another described in the novel. Here, it is done in the form of a dream, which gives cover to any strange occurrences, including the out-of-body experience at the end of the quote. This maintains the mystery behind Sadie’s situation and provides a possible explanation for any strange behavior: It was just a dream. Once again, Kubica conflates symptoms of other dissociative disorders with DID.

“I can be cold, I know. Glacial even. I’ve been told this before. I often think that I was the one to push Will into the arms of another woman. If only I had been more affectionate, more sensitive, more vulnerable. More happy. But in my life, all I’ve known is an inherent sadness.”

In a moment of honesty, Sadie admits she has led a fundamentally sad life that has prevented her from being affectionate, sensitive, and vulnerable. At least, that is how she perceives herself. To the reader and Will, Sadie is an extremely vulnerable person, in large part because she is unaware of her alters, one of whom can be easily manipulated by Will to do horrific crimes in the name of love.

“I rise from the floor reluctantly and creep back into the kitchen, overcome with the urge to vomit. There is a killer living in my home with me.”

Sadie’s mental-health condition increasingly manifests physically. In addition to experiencing memory lapses and lost blocks of time, she is now feeling physically ill as a result of her destabilization. While the last statement is true, Sadie is still looking in the wrong direction at this point, blaming Imogen or Otto for the murder. This is an example of dramatic irony, in which the reader knows more than the character, if the identity of the killer (or, rather, killers) has already been realized.

“I feel disembodied then. I watch on as another me sits slumped in a chair, speaking to a woman. ‘I do believe you, Dr. Foust. I do. I don’t think Sadie did this,’ the woman says, though her voice comes to me muffled as if I’m slipping away, drowning in water, before the room drops entirely from sight.”

This is the second time that Sadie’s transition between alters is described when both the reader and Sadie are aware of her condition. The earlier transition took place in a dream and described the loss of color and the shifting geometry of the space of the room. It was similar to an out-of-body experience, where she watched herself sleep. That incident left her with a headache. Sadie has a similar out-of-body experience here, but it is more concerning, as she feels as if she’s “slipping away, drowning in water” before losing consciousness. This might be because she has just seen a picture of Erin, who drowned, or it might be because the stress she is undergoing is causing her to become lost.

“My wife is a chameleon.”

This simple, declarative sentence reveals so much. Will, presented throughout by Sadie as the loving husband and father and by Camille as the romantic lover, is actually a heartless and manipulative murderer. He reveals that he is aware of all three personas that inhabit his wife’s body, and rather than being alarmed or seeking help for her, he feels he has hit the jackpot. Sadie can be the breadwinning public wife, while Camille can provide excitement and, if needed, protection. Will is also a chameleon who willingly abuses his wife’s mental illness for his own gain.

“There’s nothing amiss with this scene, as if Will and the kids have moved on without me, no one noticing my absence.

But the very fact that nothing is amiss makes me feel instinctually that something is wrong.”

Sadie continues to be presented as an outside observer of herself and her life. Earlier, she is described as watching herself from the outside, and here, she is literally watching her family through the window from outside her house. The last sentence is a clear example of foreshadowing.

“I almost laugh out loud. The pills do nothing. It’s only in Sadie’s head that something happens. The placebo effect. Because she thinks popping a pill will naturally make her feel better. Have a headache, pop some Tylenol. A runny nose? Some Sudafed.

You’d think, as a doctor, Sadie would know better.”

Will’s cruel and manipulative personality shines through in this quote, as exchanging Sadie’s medicine with a placebo is laughable to him. The last sentence, questioning why Sadie, a medical doctor, is so unable to control her medical condition, plays into common stigmas and misunderstandings about mental health.

“Will manipulated my condition. He made me do this. He put an idea in my head—in the part of me known as Camille—knowing this poor woman, this version of me, would have done anything in the whole wide world for him. Because she loved him so much. Because she wanted to be with him.

I feel saddened for her. And angry for me.”

This quotes contrasts, in some ways, the earlier quote when Sadie wishes she could be more vulnerable. At this point, she realizes how vulnerable to Will’s manipulation she is, although she is “outsourcing” this vulnerability to her alter, Camille, for whom she feels sorry. She has not yet begun her healing journey toward reintegrating her alters. She also feels angry, which is a much more powerful emotion.