Severance: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Candace moved to New York City after college in the summer of 2006, buoyed “by the tides of others,” following her friends who moved to the city after graduation. She spent the evenings looking to get picked up by various, typically older, men and was typically successful. One morning, Candace finds herself helping to tie the tie of an older man who admits he is divorced and estranged from his family. She seems him later on TV—Steven Reitman, an author and economist whose new book is about the transient, demotivated, and jobless condition of millennials like her.

One morning after seeing Steven, Candace walks all the way home from Manhattan to Brooklyn. At home she finds a package of her mother’s personal effects have been sent to her rather than the lawyer due to a mix-up with the estate—Candace’s mother died recently in hospice. Going through the contents of the package now, Candace finds primarily cookware and food, even though the hospice likely had no kitchen. At the bottom of the package is a Ziploc full of preserved shark fins, and Candace’s roommate Jane suggests they make shark fin soup and throw a kitschy, outdated dinner party.

While her friends get jobs and internships, Candace gets falls deeply into her rituals. She has a thorough, even obsessive personal hygiene routine that she does every morning before walking aimlessly through New York City until the sun sets and her feet are blistered. During these walks, Candace takes pictures of the ordinary sights and happenings of the city, loving to look and disappear into other people’s lives. At night, she uploads the photos to her anonymous blog NY Ghost.

On one such walk, Candace passes by Hemsley Park Lane, and she remembers when she stayed there with her parents the first time they visited New York on one of her father’s business trips. During the day, Candace and her mother would wander the city while imagining and performing different lives. At night, when her father returned home, the pair would argue, primarily about returning to China. Trying to keep the peace, Candace requested that they go get Chinese food for dinner, and they ate Peking duck. Now, Candace remembers this as the first time she understood why her father loved being in a foreign country: the safety and freedom of anonymity it allowed. That was the exact moment Candace decided she would live in New York one day.

At the shark fin party weeks later, Candace is surprised to find Steven there. They chat in her room and Steven gives her the business card to his brother, Michael Reitman, the CEO at Spectra. Candace feels a combination of gratitude, guilt, shame, and disillusionment. Steven goes to the dinner table and Candace escapes to her fire escape to cry. Her downstairs subletter is also out there, smoking and reading. He offers her a cigarette but doesn’t have a lighter. The two end up smoking and chatting in his room. His apartment is identical in layout to hers, but Candace is struck by how clean and minimal he keeps the place. The man introduces himself as Jonathan, and Candace invites him back up to the party.

Candace and Jonathan return to the party, and Jane serves the dinner. The soup is bad, and everyone begins to drink heavily—Candace wonders what she has done wrong. The party loosens up after the smoke alarm goes off and becomes raucous late into the night. Candace finds Steven intensely drunk and high in her bathroom next to Jane, who is passed out on the floor. Steven tells Candace he misses her and tries to force himself on her. Eventually Candace acquiesces to his advances, dissociating from the moment. When they go to her room, they find Jonathan there reading. Candace leads him out to the fire escape. Before heading down to his apartment, Jonathan licks her ear and whispers that she is making a mistake, but he leaves before she can react.