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‘I would like a life where I am successful.’
Mrs. Elm tutted disapprovingly. ‘For someone who has read a lot of books, you aren’t very specific with your choice of words.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Success. What does that mean to you? Money?’
‘No. Well, maybe. But that wouldn’t be the defining feature.’
‘Well, then, what is success?’
Nora had no idea what success was.
This interaction between Nora and Mrs. Elm takes place in the chapter “Fish Tank,” before Nora decides to visit the life she would have had if she had pursued competitive swimming. This conversation illustrates both the pervasive grip of success on Nora’s mind and its elusiveness as a guiding concept. Nora believes she wants a successful life, and before Mrs. Elm interrogates her ideas of success, Nora has only a vague notion that success is desirable and that it has constantly eluded her. Much of her regret is focused on not being successful. But here, when Mrs. Elm pushes her to think about it more deeply, Nora realizes she has no idea what success even is. This illustrates that her pursuit of it is not based on anything intrinsic or valuable to her. Instead, she pursues success due to external pressures to make her life conform to others’ ideals. For example, swimming itself brings her joy, but competitive swimming, which follows her father’s definition of success, brings her unhappiness. By interrogating her definition of success, Nora begins to loosen the grip the idea of success has on her life.
I know that you were expecting my TED talk on the path to success. But the truth is that success is a delusion.’
Nora says this to an audience expecting a talk on success in the chapter “The Tree That is Our Life,” which introduces her to her “successful” life as Nora the Olympic swimmer. As Nora moves through the successful life of a champion swimmer, she continues to question what it means to be successful and why success is desirable. She’s seen firsthand that the successful life of Nora the Olympian is not all it seems to be from the outside. Though her life is marked by accolades, achievements, and world records, Nora the Olympian is as lonely, lost, and unstable as Nora is in her root life. Tasked with teaching others what it means to succeed, Nora is pushed to confront that the entire concept of success is faulty. By calling it a “delusion,” Nora emphasizes that people who chase success, like those gathered to hear her talk, are pursuing something that doesn’t exist. Here, Nora recognizes, too, that her own pursuit of success is empty and brings her nothing but despair.
Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream. The married life in the pub had been Dan’s dream. The trip to Australia had been Izzy’s dream, and her regret about not going had been a guilt for her best friend more than a sorrow for herself. The dream of her becoming a swimming champion belonged to her father.
This reflection takes place in the chapter “Someone Else’s Dream,” after Nora and Mrs. Elm watch Nora’s memory of her swim across the river as a teenager. Here, Nora grapples with the ways that her regrets have all been shaped by other people’s ideas of what would make them happy in life. Because Nora hasn’t been led by her own needs, dreams, or goals, she has continually felt like a failure. This evokes the idea Nora the Olympian talks about in her Ted Talk, that living a life dictated by someone else’s dreams leads to unhappiness. This passage illustrates how Nora’s ideas of success are based on external rubrics and the ideas other people have of what her life should be. Mrs. Elm helps Nora understand that though she may have failed at living other people’s dreams, she hasn’t failed at living her own because she has yet to try.
