59 pages • 1 hour read
Brian FreemanThief River Falls
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A 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
Grief
Throughout the novel, characters cope with their own grief in different ways, some familiar, others outlandish.
Lisa has experienced an immense amount of tragedy in her life. Ten years before the novel’s events, her fiancé Danny died working as a firefighter in California. A year before, Lisa’s parents and youngest brothers all died tragically within a short period of time. By the end of the novel, it is revealed that Lisa had a son, Harlan, who died recently of cancer. Lisa hasn’t experienced these events in isolation. Rather, they have compounded over time and brought her to a breaking point. In a dissociated state, Lisa enters the world she created as an author, a world in which she still retains control.
Lisa’s grief causes her to hallucinate Purdue into existence along with other events from her novel as a means of coping with the death of her son. When Lisa meets Willow, she believes Willow may be suffering from “Brief reactive psychosis”, a behavior “driven by exhaustion and depression” (184). This moment is significant because it actually describes what Lisa herself is experiencing. Lisa explains, “In the face of severe trauma, the brain could conjure entire worlds that didn’t exist as a way of blocking out reality. Hallucinations of people and places. Delusions that the mind refused to give up” (184). After Lisa believes she has lost Purdue, she even contemplates suicide, demonstrating how bad her grief and depression has become.
The novel also explores how people cope with grief. After the deaths of their family members, Lisa’s twin brother Noah runs away. Laurel explains, “I’m not excusing what Noah did by leaving. Not at all. But people deal with loss in different ways. Not always healthy ways. Sometimes it’s just too much for one person to handle, and they snap” (48). Denis also describes the ways in which he, his wife Gillian, and others deal with grief: “Some people dealt with grief by crying. Some ran away. Some, like Gillian, drank their troubles down. Denis death with his grief by getting angry” (39). Nevertheless, the book ends on a happy note, demonstrating that people can start to recover after experiencing tragedies.
Fiction versus Reality
Lisa is an author of thriller novels. Her most successful novel is named after her hometown and contains the names of real places from Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Lisa describes how anytime she looks at a place, “every place turns into stories and crimes and characters and mysteries” (61). When Lisa meets Willow, a high school writer, Willow observes, “everybody wants to wake up in the middle of a thriller” (176). Lisa thinks it makes sense that people are apprehensive of thrillers, because there are more similarities between thrillers and real life than people would like to admit. Lisa tells Willow:
People die in my books. They kill. They betray the people who trust them. They lose the people they love. It’s not pretty. But you know what? That’s life. Writing is a mirror. If someone doesn’t like what you write, maybe it’s because they don’t like what they see in the reflection. (177)
Lisa has already experienced plenty of loss and betrayal through the deaths of her family members and Noah’s abandonment. In the novel, Lisa’s life starts to resemble a thriller more and more, until it is revealed that she is literally bringing the events from her thriller to life through hallucinations.
As the novel progresses, Lisa has trouble differentiating between real life and the characters and events from her novel. At the beginning of the novel, a boy appears in Lisa’s yard. Lisa names him Purdue, after a character in her novel, a clue that Lisa is already starting to blur the line between her fictional stories and reality. As it turns out, Lisa made up Purdue, and is simply imagining the little boy who accompanies her. Lisa even unintentionally gives Purdue the same backstory as the boy in her novel. When Purdue tells Lisa where he came from “[h]e recited the story with that odd detachment he often had in his voice, as if the events had happened to someone else. Maybe that was the only way he could face it, like a character in a novel” (160). This line is an early clue that Purdue is actually a fictional character, brought to life. By the end of the novel, Lisa is forced to admit that she imagined that her novel had come to life. She tells Laurel, “Everything got mixed up in ways I don’t understand. The real world and my fantasies” (303). Laurel imagines that because characters such as Denis Farrell were both a part of her book and real life, “your brain blended reality and delusion” (303). Fortunately, with Laurel’s help, Lisa is able to separate real life and fantasy by the end of the novel.
Home
Lisa ponders the significance of home throughout the book. Even though Lisa had a happy childhood growing up in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, she moves to an old farmland outside of the town after the deaths of her family members in order to separate herself from place-bound tragic memories. When Lisa thinks of Thief River Falls, “[s]he knew it was wrong to blame the town for everything that had happened to her, but she did. Every house, shop, trail, and intersection was a reminder of what she’d lost” (119). Nevertheless, Lisa’s new house on the farmland doesn’t feel like home to her either. Lisa observes, “She’d lived in this area for over a year, but she still didn’t know the town well. It wasn’t home to her. No place was home anymore” (58). This line emphasizes how no place can really feel like home without family or happy memories.
In the novel, Lisa is trying to help Purdue remember where he came from so she can take him home. However, Lisa becomes attached to Purdue and doesn’t want to let him go. Lisa “realized that she felt a little forlorn hearing him talk about going home. It was good, it was inevitable, it was what had to happen, but it reminded her that at the end of the day, Purdue had a place to be that wasn’t with her” (67). This indicates how much Lisa has grown to love Purdue and how hard it is for her to let him go, even though she knows Purdue deserves to return to his own home. When it is revealed that Purdue isn’t real and is instead a hallucination on Lisa’s part to help her cope with the recent death of her son, this quote further emphasizes how hard it is for Lisa to say goodbye after a lifetime of tragedy. Nevertheless, Lisa returns to Thief River Falls by the end of the book, and her twin brother Noah and his fiancée Janie decide to live in their old family home, suggesting that Lisa may find a home for herself once again.
