The Quest for Meaning Theme Analysis

If the decision had been Briar’s, the theme of her party would have been glasses because the toddler savagely wanted glasses, and to touch everyone else’s glasses, and to see how she looked in all of the glasses. But Briar also loved airplanes and pointing at them and the sounds they made, and Alix felt that this, out of all of Briar’s other interests (smelling tea bags, other people’s belly buttons, touching the soft skin on Mama’s earlobe), should be openly encouraged.

As she turned the bowl so that the ribbon faced forward, Alix remembered. Yes. Emira had asked if she could get Briar a fish for her birthday. She’d asked both Alix and Peter days ago. Alix hadn’t considered it would be a real one, because she hadn’t really been listening, but here it was, gold and wiggling.

“Bri, look.” Alix picked up a pink ball from a bin of toys and tossed it down the hall. Briar gasped, overjoyed, and dutifully pumped her arms as she went running after it.

Whenever Alix was afraid that Emira was mad at her, she came back to the same line of thought: Oh God, did she finally see what Peter said on the news? No, she couldn’t have. She’s always like this, right? Emira came upstairs as Alix finished washing her hands.

Shaunie’s two-bedroom apartment had a kitchen with an exposed brick wall and a fire escape outside the window. Josefa lived there too, but Josefa never objected to anyone referring to the space as “Shaunie’s.” It was filled with Shaunie’s things, and co-signed by Shaunie’s dad.

The reality of how completely different this run-in was from the last fifteen years of Kelley Copeland fantasies came down on Alix and crushed her lungs. She was still eight pounds heavier than she’d been before Catherine. The current state of her home wasn’t the modern, minimalist environment she’d worked so hard to achieve. And there were babies everywhere, not just the sleeping cute kind but Briar with her questions […] Throughout marriage, motherhood, and monumental career changes, Alix had always found herself forming ideal scenarios of how she would see a grown-up Kelley Copeland, or rather, how he’d see her. There were the cliché pipe dreams (seeing him after a particularly good blowout, running into him while wearing heels at the airport), but there were elaborate premises that took Alix entire showers and subway rides to fully flesh out the logistics of.

Tamra’s eyes went small in an exaggerated and confident expression. “Oh girl, yes,” she said. “One hundred percent. This is probably the best thing to ever happen to Emira.”

She chose you. Emira and Kelley are no longer together. Stay with it, Alix. You’re almost there.

Kelley was the guy who ruined her senior year, much in the same way that her name was spelled A-l-i-x.