Nine Perfect Strangers

“It shouldn’t make a difference that Jessica was disfigured by her own hand.”

By portraying Jessica’s surgery from two different viewpoints, the novel shows the different interpretations of her cosmetic procedures. Jessica believes that she has improved herself, while Ben sees the many procedures as self-inflicted wounds. These different interpretations are eventually true of the 10-day spa treatment: What Masha views as essential therapy, the guests view as something close to torture. Jessica’s cosmetic surgeries mirror the spa experience.

“For him, rules were about politeness and respect and ensuring the survival of a civilized society.”

Heather and Napoleon have different worldviews. She defines herself in opposition to him, deliberately breaking the rules that he so closely follows, sometimes without really understanding why. Heather breaks from her husband’s behavior because of repressed resentment regarding the death by suicide of their son. Her unspoken guilt and resentment manifest as a rejection of Napoleon’s habits, rather than a rejection of Napoleon himself, as she lacks the understanding to deal with her repressed pain.

“Of course, Lars did too, but he was prepared to draw the line when necessary.”

Like all the guests, Lars thinks of himself as unique. He agrees with the necessity of the rules, but only when they curtail the behavior of others. Lars is smart enough to know that he’s like other people, but vain enough to consider himself unique too. By portraying the various perspectives of all the characters, the novel shows how each character develops a personal excuse for why they don’t have to obey the rules.

“His ex-wife used to buy all his clothes.”

Tony is so encased in his own miserable world that he barely acknowledges the provenance of his clothes. The only time he can acknowledge the small favors his ex-wife and others do for him is when they stop. Tony can acknowledge these gestures only in the negative, feeling their absence much more than their presence. Similarly, Tony’s wife doesn’t recognize his gestures until he stops. Tony, like many others, is so alienated from the world that he can’t see the pleasantries and niceties that it delivers to him.

“When she was with her children, she was needed—essential, in fact: everything relied on her.”

Carmel has a fundamental desire to feel needed. Her ex-husband abandoned her for a younger woman, making Carmel feel useless and inadequate. Her children are the only people in the world who depend on her now, so she turns their dependency into an identity. Carmel’s objective for the trip is to separate her ability to feel happy from her desire to feel needed.

“At first it will feel strange. You will have to fake it.”

Masha’s spa treatments are designed to break down the facades and pretentions that the guests erect around themselves. They spend so long pretending to be something they aren’t that Masha suggests they should simply pretend to be happy. By pretending to be happy, they’ll become familiar with the actions that may make them happy. Masha encourages her guests to fake happiness to the point that they might accidently begin to feel happy.

“Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you’re starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it.”

Heather isn’t unique in her desire to be loved after a lifetime of not being loved enough. The long trail of divorces, deaths, and abandonments that all the characters suffer has left obvious voids in their lives—voids that they’re desperate to fill but too suspicious to seek out. Heather may be suspicious of love, but this sentiment is true of all the characters in some way. By learning that others are in a similar position, Heather may be able to heal and recognize that she isn’t alone.

“I did not choose this.”

Ben is firmly against drugs because his sister has a long history with substance misuse. When he finds out that Masha has drugged him, he resents her for forcing his sister’s weaknesses onto him. He feels that rather than helping him heal, she’s burdening him with another weakness. Furthermore, he resents the loss of control. He hasn’t provided consent and doesn’t know how the drugs will affect him, so the experience adds to his fear that he’s lost control of his life after winning the lottery. Rather than healing Ben, Masha is making his problems worse.

“This is not a clinical setting!”

Masha’s ethereal beauty and her status mean that she isn’t used to being challenged. Her employees and her guests are loyal, dedicated followers of her own special kind of cult. Heather, however, is willing to challenge Masha and expose the flaws in her beliefs. Heather does this by pointing out the immediate contradictions in Masha’s justifications for her work. Masha describes how dugs can work in clinical settings to treat depression; Heather points out that they aren’t in a clinical setting. This small but devastating argument completely removes the shroud of authenticity from Masha’s reasoning. From this moment onward, everything begins to fall apart.

“I’m the protagonist, obviously.”

Frances is the writer and the protagonist of the novel. Her view of the world becomes an ironic reference, hinting at a self-awareness that’s not actually true. Frances doesn’t really believe that she’s in a novel. Instead, her comment reflects her egoism. She’s detached from the world and only views other people through the literary prism that has brought her great professional success. When she stops viewing the world through this literary framework, she can forge meaningful connections once again.

“She was not falling for it.”

Heather is fundamentally a cynic. Unlike Carmel, she isn’t willing to accept Masha’s reasoning for the spa’s strange treatments. The phrase “not falling for it” suggests that Heather views the entire treatment program as a dark joke being played on her. She refuses to indulge Masha, the joke teller, and refuses to take part in the treatment.

“One memory should not eclipse all the other memories.”

Heather comes to realize that her memory of Zach is dominated by his death rather than his life. This single memory takes over all the other memories of him, meaning that she can’t think about her son without thinking about his death. This is true of the other guests as well, who allow singular tragedies to eclipse their more numerous positive memories. While not all the guests mourn the death of a child, they all struggle to disentangle their positive memories from their negative ones.

“She’d been the one to renovate it, to make it beautiful.”

Carmel renovates her home and makes it beautiful but can’t see the house as a profound metaphor for her psyche. Carmel decorates the home on her own terms, turning its aesthetics into a positive reflection of her personality, which fills her with pride. She wants to do the same for her mind, but she always tries to turn herself into someone else. Rather than trying to replicate Masha, her ex-husband’s new wife, or even her younger self, Carmel needs to renovate her psyche on her own terms. Only then will she come to see herself as beautiful.

“He […] went and sat up against a wall with Jessica, who sat chewing on her false fingernails.”

Jessica’s long, fake fingernails are a metaphor for her self-doubt. The various cosmetic procedures and aesthetic adornments she wears are attempts to become a new version of herself. She wants to reflect the social media world that she sees on her cell phone. This new identity is represented by the fingernails, but Jessica’s experience at the spa fills her with self-doubt. Separated from her phone and unsure what’s happening to her, she’s forced to challenge her self-identity. She chews at her fingernails in a subconscious, nervous reckoning with the new identity she’s built for herself, gnawing away at the version of herself that she once thought the world wanted her to be.

“Sometimes Masha had a bizarre innocence to her.”

For most of the novel, the guests have described Masha in similar terms. She has an otherworldly, ethereal beauty that adds to her credibility. They’re reluctant to challenge her because she’s so assured and confident. However, the failure of the treatment is mirrored in the cracks in their impression of Masha’s appearance. The “bizarre innocence” (201) they perceive in her robs Masha of her authority and undermines her credibility. Masha is becoming flawed and, as such, more human in their eyes. The more human she becomes, the less credible she seems. Rather than an alien expert on the human condition, Masha is as lost, as confused, and as flawed as her guests.

“She thought about the sunny Australian lives these people had been handed at birth.”

Masha’s motivation stems from a resentment of the easy lives most of her patients have experienced. She resents the sunniness and simplicity of her Australian guests, who didn’t grow up in a country where food was scarce and conditions were difficult. She forces her guests into difficult situations as a form of punishment, delivering them the pain and suffering that she feels were so formative in her life. She wants the guests to understand how truly privileged they are.

“I’m stuck in this cycle of self-loathing.”

Even though Masha’s experimental treatment descends into absurdity and chaos, the guests do have learning experiences. Carmel realizes that she’s been caught in a cycle of self-loathing, and this revelation is her path toward future happiness. However, this revelation is undermined by the situation. Carmel can’t take her revelation seriously because of the way she reached it. At once, Masha’s treatment is successful and unsuccessful, helping her guests—but not in the way she planned.

“I believed in her.”

Carmel learns more about herself, but one of the most important lessons she learns is about the way she perceives other people. Rather than trying to be like Masha, she realizes that the reverence and respect she held for Masha is completely misplaced. By realizing that Masha is as flawed as her guests, Carmel finds a common humanity with the others. She understands that even someone as seemingly perfect as Masha is just as (or even more) flawed than her. Carmel realizes that she isn’t alone.

“She had begun a new life when she emigrated, when her son died, and again when her heart stopped.”

Masha is caught in constant cycles of death and rebirth. Each time, she entirely reinvents herself as someone new. These cycles are propelled by her sheer determination and an unwillingness to engage with the tragedies of her past. By reinventing herself, she doesn’t need to reckon with the pain of the deaths of her father and her child or with her near-death experience. Each reinvention is a coping mechanism to ignore the pain and depression she regards as weakness.

“It was bizarre to see how well she responded to this meaningless corporate-speak, like a baby responds to the sound of its mother’s voice.”

The “meaningless corporate-speak” (258) mirrors the language used by the spa’s employees. Like corporate language, the health and wellness jargon is empty and vapid. Both, however, are comforting. Masha flits between both worlds, using these hollow languages to avoid the substantive and painful memories of her past. She embraces the comforting artificiality of corporate and wellness jargon rather than engage with her actual suffering.

“Yao had never smoked and now he wanted to try it.”

When Yao sees Masha smoking, he’s tempted to take up the habit for the first time in his life. In this moment, any pretense of Yao’s commitment to health is abandoned. Rather than be healthy, he simply wants to follow Masha and copy whatever she does. The moment is a revelation for Yao, revealing to him that he’s been swept up in Masha’s cult of personality rather than any real commitment to healing and helping the guests.

“I’m a better mother than you would ever be.”

Heather’s comment to Masha is stinging because it uses simple and plain language to attack the most painful memory from Masha’s past. Masha uses corporate or wellness language to distance herself from the death of her child and other similarly painful memories. When Heather bluntly criticizes her parenting ability, Masha feels the pure, raw pain that she’s tried to hide for so long. She tries to kill Heather not because she hates Heather, but because Heather has revealed how much Masha hates herself.

“And it will never, ever be enough.”

Months after leaving the spa, the Marconi family begins to realize the breadth and depth of their pain. While Heather and Napoleon release their rage, doing so doesn’t make it go away. Rather than trying to suppress or eliminate their pain, they realize that they can never eradicate it entirely. Instead, they accept the pain as a permanent part of themselves that they must deal with. They can never forget Zach or the pain of his death, but they no longer want to do so.