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Summary: Epigraph
The epigraph includes a quote from the poet Sylvia Plath, who took her own life, about how she felt it was impossible to be all the people she wanted to be and live all the lives she wanted to live. This quote is followed by a quote about the Midnight Library, a place that exists between life and death, in which each book allows a person to try out a different life.
Summary: A Conversation About Rain
This section is set in Nora Seed’s past, nineteen years before Nora decided to end her life. She is sixteen years old, playing chess with Mrs. Elm, her school librarian. Nora feels that Mrs. Elm is the person who best understands her. Nora struggles not to compare Mrs. Elm to her mother, who she feels doesn’t understand her and treats her as an error in need of fixing. Nora is concerned because her father is upset with her for quitting swimming. Mrs. Elm tells Nora that there’s more to live than swimming quickly. She says that Nora is in an exciting moment in her life and that she has her entire life ahead of her. Nora could be an astronaut who travels the galaxy or a glaciologist. Their conversation is interrupted by a phone call with terrible news for Nora.
Summary: The Man at the Door
Nineteen years later, and twenty-seven hours before she decides to end her life, Nora is sitting alone in her apartment in her pajamas, scrolling through her phone when a man rings her doorbell. Ash, a surgeon who asked her out a few years ago, is at her door with news that Nora’s ginger tabby Volts appears to be dead by the side of the road. Nora is overcome with familiar grief and goes out to find her cat lifeless in the street. When she sees him, she feels not pity but envy that he has passed away.
Summary: String Theory
Nora arrives late to her job at String Theory, a store that sells musical instruments. She tells her boss, Neil, that her cat died and she’s late because she overslept after burying him. Neil tells Nora that, after working at String Theory for twelve years, it’s time that she finds a new path. He tells her that she isn’t happy there. She says that her mental health issues are situational, though she thinks privately that this is a lie. She thinks about her mother dying and the fact that she broke up with her fiancé Dan two days before their wedding. Neil encourages her to do something else, such as put her degree in philosophy to use or take up the causes that she believes in. He reminds her that she used to be in a band with her brother, The Labyrinths, and says her brother Joe came in recently on her day off. Nora is stung by this, sure that Joe is avoiding her. Neil tells her that she’s smart and cares about the world. Nora negates everything Neil says and tells him she’s happy at String Theory. Though Nora tries to fight for her job, Neil tells her that he has to fire her.
Summary: To Live is to Suffer
Nora wanders the street, thinking about Dan. He texted her the day before, and she lied about being busy because she didn’t want to cause him any more pain. It begins to rain, and Nora has a sense of deep dread, afraid things are going to get worse.
Summary: Doors
Nora ducks into a news shop to get out of the rain. She sees a copy of National Geographic with a black hole on the cover. She remembers being fascinated by an article in the magazine about Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago, when she was young, and she remembers her conversation with Mrs. Elm about wanting to be a glaciologist.
In the news shop, she runs into her former bandmate Ravi, and they have a hurtful confrontation. Ravi blames Nora for the dissolution of their band. Ravi also blames Nora for her brother’s depression and financial struggles. Ravi accuses Nora of being afraid of life, and Nora tells Ravi that he blames other people for his disappointing life. He leaves the shop.
Nora then runs into an acquaintance from high school, Kerry-Anne who remembers that Nora was promising as a teenage swimmer and academic. When Nora tells her she quit swimming and music and still lives in their hometown, Kerry-Anne asks her if she has any kids. Nora remembers that Dan wanted kids. She was terrified that motherhood would depress her even more. She leaves the shop, filled with grief and despair.
Summary: How to Be a Black Hole
Nora searches for someone to help her with her depression, but she can’t get ahold of anyone. Her best friend Izzy, whom she hasn’t talked to in a long time, doesn’t respond to her text message. She notices a poster for a Ryan Bailey movie. She then thinks about her favorite philosopher Thoreau, and she struggles to find a purpose or reason to exist.
Summary: Antimatter
Nora misses an appointment teaching her sole piano student, Leo, and his mother fires her. She runs into her neighbor Mr. Banerjee, who cheerfully tells her that he doesn’t need her to pick up his medication anymore. Nora feels that no one in the world needs her. She is filled with regret. After taking her antidepressants and drinking a bottle of wine, she realizes that all her decisions have been mistakes. She feels that every move she’s made in her life has moved her away from her potential, to be a swimmer, a musician, a spouse, a philosopher, or to go down any number of other paths. In just two days, she has lost the small things tethering her to the world: her cat, her job, her student, and her role in helping a neighbor.
She decides to end her life. Nora leaves a voice message for her brother, telling him she loves him. She then writes a note addressed to “Whoever” about all the regrets she has and how impossible it feels for her to continue. She feels as though she has nothing to give.
Analysis
These chapters explore Volts as a symbol of grief and love with nowhere to go. At the beginning of the novel, Nora is happiest when she talks about Volts. Caring for the cat anchors her to her life and gives her a small sense of purpose. When Ash tells her that Volts has died, her smile from describing Volts freezes on her face, which parallels the way her love for the cat suddenly has nowhere to go. Volts’ death is the first in a series of unfortunate events that drive Nora deeper into depression, regret, and despair. In the absence of even an animal to care for, her sense of longing for connection turns to violence toward herself. For example, when she talks to herself before her suicide attempt and in her suicide note, she mentions how much she loves her brother but paradoxically says she has nothing left to give the world. Nora struggles throughout the novel to find a place to put all the love she has, and this creates a sense of grief that drives her to end her life.
The beginning of the novel introduces the theme of the power of despair to distort reality. The conversation between Neil and Nora illustrates both how much Nora has going for her and how Nora’s depression makes life’s joys and possibilities inaccessible to her. Neil lists Nora’s many talents, accomplishments, and virtues as he fires her, making the argument that Nora could still have any life she wants to have. Each time Neil mentions something good about Nora, Nora mentally argues with or deflects the idea. Seeped in grief and despair, Nora can only see the parts of life that support her thesis that she is a bad person and has made all the wrong choices in her life. Though she attempts to reach out to other people, each thwarted connection seems to support her belief that she doesn’t matter to anyone. Her despair darkens her view of herself and her life to such a total degree that she can’t imagine living another day.
The beginning of the novel also introduces the motif of regret and the haunting of lives not lived. Even before she enters the library, Nora is haunted by all the choices she has made and all the turns in life she didn’t take. For example, Neil and Kerry-Anne both bring up Nora’s past as a swimmer, which she interprets as a reminder not of what she’s capable of but of the potential she’s squandered. She is haunted by more recent choices she’s made, too, from leaving Dan to not going to Australia with Izzy. Like despair, her sense of regret distorts her ability to perceive reality and casts her life as a series of dead ends and mistakes without the hope for change. For Nora, regret is corrosive, and it has a toxic power to keep her stuck in the past, in a limbo that parallels that of the library.
