37 pages • 1 hour read
LancaliI Fell in Love with Hope
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Living in the Moment
Content Warning: The following analysis references abortion.
American poet Emily Dickinson said in her poem of the same title, “[f]orever—is composed of Nows” (Dickinson, Emily. “Forever—in composed of Nows.” Poetry Society). None of the characters in l Fell in Love with Hope knows this better than Sony, who lives for the moment because of her child who never lived. Rather than spend her time dwelling on the inevitability of her death, Sony uses her time to help other children and experience life. She and Sam emphasize the contrast between living in the moment versus for an imagined future.
Sam views Sony’s condition as unfair because it is taking away the future that belongs to her. He narrates:
Today is worth infinitely more than tomorrow. But Sony’s tomorrow held a career, the end of Neo’s manuscript, a look in the mirror at a new tattoo, and a sparking infinity of futures that rightfully belonged to her (272).
Sam has lost hope in the ability to live a full life. He only considers what people lose when disease takes over their lives; he cannot conceive that Sony can be happy with her life because, as he sees it, her life will end early and unfairly due to her lung condition. He cannot live in the moment—only for the past or the future. The concept of “tomorrow,” an imagined series of events that make a different day worth living for, eclipses his ability to see what is in front of him.
Sony, on the other hand, does not view her condition as the end of her experiences. She leads the band of “misfits” in their thieving adventures, encourages them to escape the hospital, and cannot decide what she wants to experience first after they leave. Where Sam focuses on death, Sony endeavors to fill her limited time with as much life as possible. With her dying breath, Sonny assures Sam shouldn’t cry for her death because “[i]t was a good day” (272). Her final words reassure him that their day at the beach, their momentary now, is a moment that she will treasure forever.
Where Sam focuses solely on the days that were and the days that may never be, Sony draws attention to the present. She acknowledges potential futures, but does not allow them to interfere with her existence in the present. Tomorrow can deliver what it will, so long as today—her present—can be called a “good day.”
Illness as a Label and a Prison
Sam’s experiences with hospital patients make him cynical. He hates that Hikari encourages the others to live as if they see a forever, viewing her hope as a “constant game of pretend that she plays with the future as if it’s set in stone” (167). Sam loses so many people that he feels entrapped; those losses become a prison with bars through which he can only see people as their diseases. This reflects a wider societal issue that portrays and treats people with illnesses, visible and invisible, as if they are nothing more than their condition. Sam reflects a society that cannot see people beyond their diseases and what is “killing them.”
Neo brings this to the forefront. Sam tries to explain the lover he lost as his lacking immune system, to which Neo replies: “No, I don’t give a shit about his disease. You didn’t love his disease. You loved him. Tell me about him” (188). In seeing his friends as no more than their illnesses, Sam does not see the people underneath.
Sam projects his own views onto others. When C is doubtful and Neo tries to encourage him, Sam believes that an older version of Neo “would say that the world is fundamentally unfair and chances are the illusions of choices time takes for itself” (297). Sam, standing in for society, takes it upon himself to speak for everyone as though he has the authority to do so. He has no disease, he is not dying, yet he believes that he can speak for those who are. His view of illness traps Sam and precludes understanding his friends as people with their own hopes, dreams, and voices.
Chronic Illness and Autonomy
Chronic illness refers to both physical and mental conditions that individuals experience over a long period of time. Lancali explores the illnesses of characters with a variety of diseases—each comes to the hospital with both a physical and mental injury. Whether they deal with depression, emotional abuse, or societal pressure and anxiety, others believe that they know what’s best for them and their treatment.
Each character who has an illness asserts control of their autonomy and their care. This raises the question of whether parents or other loved ones overstep boundaries.
Lancali shows how people take away autonomy by ignoring aspects of a person they do not wish to see and forcing them into a perceived version of themselves. Neo experiences this with his father, who does not want Neo to be a writer. In his letter to his father, Neo states: “I knew, even then, when I was barely at your knee, that it bothered you when my teachers called me reserved rather than outgoing” (324). He feels the impact of disappointing his father and deviating from his father’s expectations.
What Neo’s father does not understand, and what Sam must learn from Neo, is that people have their own paths. One person cannot impose their views on another because one approach to life will not fit everyone. Parents in particular “feel threatened by […] autonomy. They cling to the idea of their child, the idea of who they are. Anything off script feels like disobedience” (106-07). This applies to a variety of situations—when offspring assert control over chronic illness or sexuality, for example.
Lancali provides characters who experience challenges to their autonomy, not only in relation to their health, but in relation to their person. The narrative never allows these characters to lose that autonomy—everyone rises above their struggles. Neo doesn’t allow his father to suppress his desire to write or who he loves. Sony makes difficult and important choices. Hikari manages depression and the pressures of her family to live a fulfilling life beyond the hospital. These characters become a beacon of hope. They suggest that autonomy can and should be respected in all situations; when people feel respected, it leads to happiness.
