45 pages • 1 hour read
Fran LittlewoodAmazing Grace Adams
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.
Chapters 31-43Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: “Now”
Ben is preparing for Lotte’s birthday party when he receives a text from Freja Harris about Grace. She tells Ben that her encounter with Grace on the street has her worried about Grace. Ben assures Freja that Grace is fine. However, Ben is in fact worried about Grace. He sends her a text begging her to call, message, or email him to let him know that she’s okay.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Three Months Earlier”
Grace is outside her house when she sees Nate Karlsson approaching. She is surprised to see him on her street and hopes that she looks okay. She feels silly for worrying about her appearance because Nate is Lotte’s teacher. She tries to dismiss her feelings, but she senses something intimate pass between them when they engage in conversation. Grace feels even more attracted to Nate when he reaches out and removes a leaf from her face. Grace pulls away from Nate when another mother, Nisha, appears outside the house.
After Nate leaves, Grace and Nisha chat. Nisha informs Grace that she saw a girl she believes was Lotte kissing a boy in the park outside Nisha’s house. Grace is confused and angry. She wonders if Nisha would have told her this information if she hadn’t been passing by her home.
Chapter 33 Summary: “2006”
The narrative switches to Ben’s perspective. Grace is furious with Ben during a Christmas church service. Ben is confused by his wife’s coldness. Then he realizes Grace saw a note his ex-girlfriend, Lina, wrote about meeting in January. Ben was with Lina before Grace got pregnant, but he never told Grace about Lina or Lina about Grace and Lotte. Ben and Lina have encountered one another during business conferences in the years since. He has never mentioned these encounters to Grace.
Grace and Ben get into an argument about Lina during the service and go to the church lobby to continue arguing. Ben tries to explain the situation, insisting that nothing happened with Lina and that he loves Grace and Lotte. Grace is doubtful. She swears that she will leave Ben if he ever cheats on her.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Now”
Grace realizes that she has lost her way. She looks at the maps on her phone to see where she is. She discovers that she has “come a mile in the wrong direction” (143). She sits down and studies her iCloud photos again. She then remembers what she is supposed to be doing and traipses across the grass. She discovers that she is on a golf course. A man playing golf gets upset with her. Grace steals his golf club and leaves.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Three Months Earlier”
Ben reads an email from Grace about what Nisha told her. Grace is furious that Lotte snuck out and wants Ben to handle the situation.
Ben takes Lotte out for dinner to confront her about her behavior. He warns her about making the right friends and protecting herself. Ben thinks about Grace’s frustrations with Lotte throughout his conversation with his daughter. Suddenly, Lotte starts to cry. She is upset that Ben and Grace split up. She excuses herself to the bathroom to fix her makeup. Ben reads a message on Lotte’s phone about Lotte becoming famous on TikTok.
Chapter 36 Summary: “2008”
Grace meets up with her friend Marie about securing a new job. She feels like an imposter as soon as she enters Marie’s building. Grace feels even more discouraged when Marie tells her that she has aged out of the television industry. Marie informs her that women cannot be both careerists and mothers. Grace tries to make sense of this idea.
Chapter 37 Summary: “Now”
Grace tries to buy water at a corner store but doesn’t have enough cash. She starts to get upset with the clerk, but an elderly woman intercedes and buys the water for her. Outside, Grace sits down and drinks the water. The woman from inside approaches. She notices that Grace is bleeding and seems unwell. She asks Grace if she is a mother. She assures Grace that what she is feeling isn’t anger, but grief. Grace reflects on the woman’s words and her fraught relationship with her own mother. She finds herself confiding in the woman. The woman assures Grace that she isn’t invisible. Grace is grateful for the woman’s kindness.
Chapter 38 Summary: “Three Months Earlier”
Grace visits the doctor. Her mind wanders to her conflicts with Ben and Lotte throughout the appointment. Grace is pulled back to the present when the doctor informs her that she has an autoimmune disorder affecting her genitals. Grace feels as if she should give up on everything.
Chapter 39 Summary: “2012”
Ben finds a note from Grace saying that she can’t stay in the house anymore and has left. Ben is struggling too and wishes that Grace had made a different choice. He tries to stay strong for eight-year-old Lotte in Grace’s absence. He makes excuses about Grace’s whereabouts.
Chapter 40 Summary: “Now”
Grace is nearing her destination. However, she grows upset when she suddenly starts thinking about Nate Karlsson. She wonders how she has kept herself from giving up over the past months.
Grace is about to call Ben when she receives a call from the police. They ask if she abandoned her car in the middle of the road. Grace lies and says that she is having a miscarriage. The officer asks if she needs help. Grace hangs up on him.
Grace continues walking. Her mind delves into the past. She is overwhelmed by guilt and sorrow, which seem inseparable from motherhood itself. She recalls Ben cheating on her and leaving.
Chapter 41 Summary: “Two Months Earlier”
Grace receives another series of communications from Lotte’s school about Lotte’s attendance and behavior. On her way to her teaching gig, Grace’s mind races through all of the terrible things that could happen to Lotte. Then she spots Lotte with an anonymous male individual. Grace tries to veer off the road to stop Lotte but fails. She didn’t see who Lotte was kissing but blames him for Lotte’s erratic behavior.
Grace reaches Stanhope Primary late. Her supervisor, Karen Marsden, says she has to let Grace go: She has received complaints from parents about Grace’s behavior. Grace remembers crying during class when the students discussed their difficult home lives.
Back at home, Grace confronts Lotte about seeing her near the recreation center with a man. Lotte is evasive and defensive, and Grace snaps, blaming Lotte for the loss of her job.
Chapter 42 Summary: “2012”
Grace leaves London to be with Cate in Los Angeles. She feels better away from home but regrets leaving Lotte behind. The time in Los Angeles with Cate allows Grace to reflect on her life and her family.
Chapter 43 Summary: “Now”
Grace boards the train, afraid that she will be late for Lotte’s party. She realizes that she should have gotten on the train hours ago. At first, riding the train is relieving. Grace is glad that she is finally making a good decision. However, when a man presses himself against Grace and tries to grope her, Grace is overcome by rage and headbutts the stranger. The other passengers are more concerned about the man’s well-being than Grace’s.
Chapters 31-43 Analysis
The third-person limited point of view formally captures an important facet of Grace’s character arc and development: Her estrangement from her true self, which deepens the closer she gets to her supposed destination. Despite the seeming simplicity of her goal—to attend her daughter’s 16th birthday party—Grace is not really acting on any straightforward motivations; that she convinces herself a cake will solve her problems in fact illustrates how tangled her thoughts and feelings are. Ever since losing her daughter Bea, breaking up with her husband, fighting with her daughter Lotte, and losing both of her jobs, Grace has been experiencing an ongoing crisis of identity. At the start of the novel, Grace believes that she is in control of her life. The harder that she tries to prove this fact to herself, however, the less centered and balanced she feels. Her increasingly erratic behavior throughout these chapters furthers the novel’s explorations of Aging as a Form of Loss and Motherhood as an Identity.
When Grace was a young woman, she defined herself outside the parameters of motherhood. In the chapters that depict scenes from Grace’s past, Grace is a spirited intellectual who knows her own mind. Such representations of Grace contrast with the depiction of Grace as the harried, flustered middle-aged mother of the narrative present. The older Grace hasn’t lost her linguistic capacities, but she struggles to communicate with everyone, no matter how intimate she is with them. The events of Chapter 36 mark a turning point in this facet of Grace’s character. After Grace becomes a mother, she attempts to reenter the workforce. However, as soon as she meets Marie about a new job, Grace “feels a fraud” (151). She is now in her thirties and hasn’t been working for several years, undercutting her confidence. When Marie expresses reservations about hiring her, Grace is rendered speechless. This moment marks a shift in Grace’s self-regard. Without her former vocation and television presence, Grace is unsure how to define herself. Because she never wanted to have children, adopting motherhood as her primary identity feels forced and insincere to Grace. In Chapter 37, Grace realizes the reason she “didn’t want children” and confesses to a stranger that she is “a terrible mother” (159). As Grace’s past and present lives converge, Grace struggles to reconcile who she thought she was with who she is becoming; her difficulties communicating reflect her uncertainty about who she is.
Littlewood traces Grace’s crisis of identity via a series of allusions to her former translating and teaching jobs. In the “Now” chapters, Grace is unemployed. In the surrounding chapters, she is still working as a part-time translator and assistant French teacher. Grace needs these jobs to support herself, but neither of them brings her joy or fulfillment. In Chapter 41, Grace races to Stanhope Primary for work but ends up arriving late, her concern over her daughter trumping her investment in her work. The same principle applies to Grace’s translating gig, which she repeatedly abandons in order to investigate Lotte’s secretive behaviors and pastimes. In these ways, the author subtextually conveys where Grace’s greatest concern lies. She has told herself that she isn’t a good mother for so long that she has convinced herself she isn’t invested in her child. She has allowed Bea’s death to support these maternal insecurities. All of Grace’s behaviors, however, suggest that she is a loyal and devoted mother. As the woman outside the corner store tells Grace, “You do the best you can. We all do” (160). The woman also assures Grace that her frustration isn’t rage but rather “fear […] grief exploded” (160). Because Grace feels she has failed as a mother, she resists owning that identity even as she can no longer define herself by her career.
