48 pages • 1 hour read
Kristin HannahFly Away
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A 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 16-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Tully continues to work on her memoir as the summer of 2008 unfolds. She discovers, however, that Marah has been lying to her about having a job at a coffee shop. Instead of going to work, Marah has been spending time with Paxton. Tully is enraged when she catches the two in bed together.
The day arrives for Marah to move to college. Both Tully and Johnny help her settle into her new dorm room, Tully recounting stories of her and Kate’s time at the same university. She and Johnny are surprised when Paxton arrives and Johnny, though he disapproves of Marah’s dating him, concedes to leave Marah be.
Time passes; Tully celebrates Christmas of 2008 with the Ryan family. A year later, she and Johnny decide to surprise Marah by picking her up from college for the holiday break. They are shocked to find her in bed with Paxton, along with evidence that the two have been doing drugs. Johnny and Paxton argue, and Marah insists she wants to drop out of college. Johnny blames Tully when Marah storms off with Paxton.
Chapter 17 Summary
After the incident in Marah’s dorm, Tully sinks back into a depression, sleeping and taking pills for weeks. She takes a call from Kate’s mom, who is upset that Tully has broken her promise to look after Marah.
On Christmas Eve, Tully decides to go to the Ryan home. She gathers gifts and takes the ferry to Bainbridge Island, but she decides to turn around and go back home, certain that Johnny will refuse her. Tully continues to swallow pill after pill, hoping to calm herself.
As she drives home, she is pulled over and given a field sobriety test. Though she protests that she has drunk no alcohol, she is brought to the local jail for driving under the influence of a substance. Desperate to be released, Dr. Desmond Grant is the only person Tully can think of phoning.
Dr. Grant brings her home and the two head up to Tully’s condo. He appears to want to spend time with Tully, but all Tully wants to do is go to sleep.
Chapter 18 Summary
Tully sinks further into her depression, unable to do anything beyond taking Xanax, though they do not help in the way they once did. One day she receives a phone call from Kate’s mom, who is close by Tully’s condo and wishes to get together. When Tully opens the door, however, she finds her own mother. Angry at having been tricked, Tully refuses to listen to her mother who insists Tully has an addiction.
The narrative shifts to the present and Tully continues to talk to Kate while in the coma. Nearby, Johnny and Kate’s mom meet with a detective who reveals that Tully was under the influence of Xanax, Ambien, and Vicodin when she crashed her car. Johnny wonders if the crash was a suicide attempt.
Meanwhile, Tully’s mother, now going by her given name—Dorothy—arrives home after selling fruit and vegetables at the local farmer’s market to discover a note about Tully’s condition. She rushes via taxi to the hospital, and her thoughts wander back to 2005, when Tully was at the height of her career.
At that time, she had lived with an abusive man called Truc. Dorothy/Cloud finally leaves the home they share after being punched by Truc. She takes a bus to Seattle, certain this is a place where she can become invisible.
Chapter 19 Summary
Cloud/Dorothy awakens in a hospital after being beaten up on the streets of Seattle. A counselor offers to help her with her substance use disorder, but she refuses. Tully comes to visit, but Dorothy does not wish to speak to her. She leaves the hospital and finds herself wandering the streets. With only a little money and the business card of the rehab facility, Dorothy heads there.
In the months that follow, Dorothy becomes sober and makes plans to return to the house on Firefly Lane to begin organic gardening. Sobriety is not easy, but she has begun to face her past, except for Tully, whom she is not yet ready to see. One day Kate’s mom passes by, and the two women talk briefly. She tells Dorothy of Kate’s cancer and urges Dorothy to contact Tully.
Chapter 20 Summary
Dorothy is outside gardening when a flower delivery truck catches her eye. She follows it to the Mularkey house where the porch overflows with bouquets. Dorothy reads one of the cards and learns Kate has passed away. She decides she will attend the funeral to support Tully.
Dorothy purchases new clothes and gets a haircut, but as she stands outside of the church, she cannot bring herself to go inside. She watches Tully from afar.
The narrative, then, shifts to the present and Tully has a sense that her mother is nearby. Dorothy arrives at the hospital and goes to Tully’s room after being encouraged by Kate’s family to talk to her. Dorothy tells Tully about her life before Tully, which is something she has never revealed to her before. Her parents were Ukrainian, and, growing up in California, endured racism at times during the 1950s. Her father was an alcoholic and was abusive. When Dorothy becomes a teenager, he sexually assaults her. Soon after, she has a breakdown at school.
Chapter 21 Summary
Dorothy continues to narrate her past. Her parents send her to a psychiatric hospital after her breakdown where she endures electroshock therapy. She is told she must learn to be “good” to be released. Her mother insists the accusations Dorothy has made against her father are lies.
When she returns home, Dorothy learns to stay quiet and demure. Her father continues to abuse her physically, but the sexual violence ends when Dorothy reminds him that she could become pregnant. Soon a “greaser” at school named Rafe Montoya takes interest in her; they secretly date and Dorothy becomes pregnant.
Chapter 22 Summary
Dorothy tells Rafe of her pregnancy and the two make plans to leave together. Rafe, the son of migrant workers, works farms across California and the two sleep everywhere from abandoned shacks to hotels. After Tully is born, Dorothy suffers post-partum depression, though she does not understand that this is what is causing her to feel unstable. One night she and Rafe fight, and she hits him. The incident ends with Rafe in jail and Dorothy’s father being called.
Her parents force Dorothy to be hospitalized for a second time, where she remains for two years. During this time, she receives tranquilizers. She is released into her parents’ care who have legally obtained custody of Tully. Dorothy dreads returning to her parents’ home, but Tully seems to have become attached to Dorothy’s mother.
One evening when her father insults her, Dorothy pushes him down the stairs and he dies. Knowing she will be held responsible, Dorothy flees, leaving Tully behind. She hitchhikes to Salinas and spends her time looking for Rafe, getting high, and sleeping with other men. Eventually she arrives at his home where his uncle still lives, only to learn that Rafe has been killed in the Vietnam War.
Eventually, Dorothy decides to return to Seattle to retrieve Tully. There she learns that her father did not die but had been paralyzed by the fall. Dorothy takes Tully with her, but Tully must be hospitalized after eating one of Dorothy’s brownies laced with marijuana. Dorothy, then, relinquishes care of Tully back to her mother.
In the present, Dorothy’s story is interrupted when an alarm attached to Tully suddenly sounds.
Chapters 16-22 Analysis
Tully spirals further out of control as the plot reaches the present day and the incident that lands her in the hospital is revealed. Though she begins to make progress on the memoir, it is the discovery of Marah’s dishonesty that sets Tully’s downslide in motion. She has trusted that Marah has been doing better, working at a job and spending time with her old friends. Her secretly spending time with Paxton instead is a betrayal of Tully’s trust, and Tully fears he will negatively influence Marah. When Marah later drops out of college, it is Tully upon whom Johnny places the blame. He too views Tully’s inability to keep Marah safe as a failure to fulfill her promise to Kate. It is this failed promise, then, that upsets Tully the most. As her relationship with both Johnny and Marah is now severed, her addiction becomes increasingly dangerous. It is unclear whether the car accident is a suicide attempt or not. This possibility is brought up and Marah is nearly certain that this was Tully’s aim.
While Marah does not narrate any of this section, readers view her spiraling into harm as well her failure in Coping with Grief. The distance between she and Tully grows as Marah becomes increasingly convinced that only Paxton can understand the pain she feels over the loss of her mother. Marah is determined to leave her old self behind, convinced that she can no longer live out the plans that she made before her mother’s death—college, a suburban life like her parents, and the like. Paxton represents a completely different life than what Marah’s family has envisioned for her, and Marah’s pursuit of that life becomes both a way to rebel and to run from the continued grief she feels.
Tully’s mother, though referenced previously at various times, now becomes a narrator. Her neglect and disregard for Tully’s well-being featured prominently in the previous book, Firefly Lane. In the years after Kate’s death, her absence becomes more palpable for Tully as she is missing her primary support. It has been clear that others, such as the Mularkeys, have witnessed the hurt done to Tully by her mother. Tully’s reluctance in Confronting the Past to write her memoir is an indication of just how painful the relationship—or lack of—with her mother is. Importantly, Dorothy has withheld facts about her background from Tully. Readers can speculate as to her reasons for this, though it seems Dorothy’s own inability to face the past is instrumental, along with shame for the way she has emotionally mistreated Tully.
The life history that Dorothy reveals is one filled with trauma. The mistreatment by both of her parents and subsequent hospitalization shaped Dorothy irrevocably. Her turning to drugs and her subsequent addiction becomes understandable as her painful past is made apparent. That she has always loved Tully, despite not always making the best decisions or demonstrating that love, becomes apparent as she recalls the pain of being separated from her. Where Tully felt abandoned by her mother, Dorothy’s decision to keep Tully safe from herself by allowing Tully’s grandmother to raise her provides another way of viewing the circumstances. Importantly, Dorothy was able to change her life, becoming sober and therefore stable. It is unclear whether Tully can hear Dorothy as she recounts her past, but that Dorothy is willing to open up to Tully indicates that an important transformation has taken place. She has withheld from Tully information that Tully has desired—specifically, the identity of Tully’s father. Finally learning this information should bring Tully a sense of completeness and help her to understand the decisions that Dorothy has made.
Interestingly, Dorothy’s life parallels that of other characters in unexpected ways. Dorothy chooses Rafe in part because of his life as a migrant farmer, which resists societal norms in a way that resembles Marah’s interest in Paxton with his anti-suburbia stance. Likewise, Dorothy’s decades-long substance use disorder allows her to identify with the struggle that has brought Tully to be hospitalized. This suggests that, if Tully is to survive, she may be able to recover the same way that Dorothy has.
At the end of the section, it appears that Tully may have died. It seems, however, that she knows her mother is present and presumably has heard her mother speak of her past.
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