What This Theme Explores
Family, Betrayal, and Belonging in How to Kill Your Family interrogates whether “family” is a moral bond or a branded enclosure—who gets inside, who is kept out, and who pays for the gatekeeping. It asks how the wound of exclusion warps identity, turning love into score-settling and belonging into a ledger of debts. The novel treats blood ties as a currency hoarded by the powerful and “found family” as a tempting but fragile alternative, testing whether any bond can survive secrecy and self-preservation. At its core, the book studies how betrayal becomes both origin story and operating system, shaping every choice its characters make.
How It Develops
The theme begins with a single, definitive rejection. In the Prologue, we learn that Grace Bernard is the child of a forbidden liaison and that her father, Simon Artemis, chooses legitimacy and image over responsibility. The exclusion of Grace’s mother, Marie Bernard, by the entire Artemis clan hardens into Grace’s worldview: to them, family isn’t love but a credential she will never be allowed to hold.
As Grace carries out her plan, belonging twists into a motive for annihilation. Each murder—beginning with the grandparents Jeremy and Kathleen Artemis—is not only retribution but a perverse assertion of kinship: if she can’t be their heir, she will be their historian and executioner. The Artemis network she uncovers is brittle and performative, bound by money and optics rather than loyalty. Against this, Grace’s life with the Latimers—especially her bond with Jimmy Latimer—looks like a warmer, messier alternative, yet her secrets keep her at a perpetual remove; even love cannot admit all of her.
By the end, the book detonates both blood and chosen bonds. Grace’s most intimate betrayal arrives when Jimmy testifies against her, proving her “found family” cannot withstand the pressure of truth. Then the final inversion: another secret heir, Harry Hawthorne, steals her ultimate revenge and weaponizes the very exclusion that formed them both, while a prison ally, Kelly McIntosh, turns informant. Every circle of belonging closes, and Grace is left outside all of them—alone, defined at last not by family but by its catastrophic absence.
Key Examples
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The Initial Betrayal: Simon’s letter to Marie is a bureaucratic severing masquerading as moral rectitude. By spelling out that Grace “will never” belong, he converts private cowardice into official policy, inaugurating the rage that drives the novel.
Your daughter is not, nor ever will be, a part of my family. I have a wife, Marie! I have a daughter... In return, I demand that you cease all contact. Simon.
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The Artemis Family’s Complicity: Helene’s account reveals the rejection wasn’t a single man’s lapse but an orchestrated family decision. Turning Grace and Marie into a “scheme” rationalizes cruelty as prudence, making the entire clan culpable.
They knew about me from the start, Helene explained... Jeremy proudly told Helene that he and his wife had spent several hours shutting this idea down, making him see that Marie had done it deliberately for money.
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The Found Family Dynamic: The Latimers offer shelter and a semblance of home, but charity has strings. Grace’s awareness that she is a “good deed” transforms hospitality into another stage on which she performs worthiness—and knows she is still an outsider.
Sophie is obsessed with a good deed. You were just one of them. Why didn’t you take the hint when you hit 18 and slink off? A grown adult with a boring job isn’t quite the prize that a child with a dead mother is. You’re no use.
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Jimmy’s Betrayal: Grace’s one safe harbor collapses in public, under oath. His testimony is not just legal damage; it is existential proof that the family she chose cannot hold her darkest truths.
Jimmy told the police he thought it was a murder immediately, yelling about how much I hated Caro. My jealousy, it was suggested, led me to push her violently off the balcony... Jimmy, giving evidence against me.
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The Final Twist: Harry refracts Grace’s story back at her—another discarded child of Simon who plays a different, colder game. By seizing the kill, the inheritance, and the narrative, he ossifies belonging into leverage.
It might initially feel as if a man has swooped in and taken your victory away from you, but that’s not it at all. I just had better cards.
Character Connections
Grace Bernard: Grace is both product and critic of the Artemis definition of family. She insists on recognition by erasing the very people whose acknowledgment she craves, a contradiction that traps her between vengeance and longing. With the Latimers, she brushes against genuine belonging but cannot risk the visibility it requires; secrecy keeps her safe and permanently alone.
Simon Artemis: Simon treats family as brand management. His original betrayal engineers the novel’s moral weather: he converts intimacy into liability and lineage into a fortress, ensuring that the “family” he protects is nothing more than a curated image—one that ultimately invites its own destruction.
Jimmy Latimer: Jimmy embodies the promise and limits of chosen kin. He offers love without pedigree, yet when confronted with the truth, he defaults to self-preservation and legality, revealing how even the sincerest “found family” can fracture under the weight of hidden violence.
Harry Hawthorne: Harry is Grace’s funhouse mirror—discarded by the same patriarch, but fluent in quiet coercion rather than spectacle. His betrayal proves that exclusion doesn’t only produce avengers; it also breeds consummate players who treat kinship as a market and loyalty as a chip.
Kelly McIntosh: Kelly parodies intimacy: proximity without commitment, confidence without care. Her final reveal as an informant turns “prison friendship” into yet another transaction, confirming Grace’s grim lesson that even solidarity among the dispossessed can be bought.
Symbolic Elements
The Artemis Mansion: The gated Hampstead house is a literal emblem of exclusion—visible, desirable, and fortified. Grace’s memory of standing outside in the rain fixes the mansion as both a shrine to status and a weatherproof lie about who counts.
Jeremy’s Tie: The club tie Grace takes after killing Jeremy is her first stolen credential, a trophy of status seized rather than bestowed. It materializes her thesis: if family is only a badge, she can claim it by force.
The List of Names: Written on the back of a photo of Grace and Marie, the list fuses love and annihilation. Crossing off each name ritualizes vengeance as filial devotion, binding Grace’s grief to her violence so tightly that one cannot be undone without the other.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel skewers a culture where lineage and image grant impunity, echoing contemporary anger at inheritance, nepotism, and elite impunity—Grace’s rampage reads as a dark fantasy of class revenge. It also troubles the comforting ideal of “found family,” reminding us that care without transparency can curdle when tested. Finally, it captures the psychic fallout of being told you don’t belong: how rejection can harden into identity, and how the hunger to be seen can turn destructive when every door stays shut.
Essential Quote
Your daughter is not, nor ever will be, a part of my family.
This line is the thesis of the Artemis worldview: belonging is a decision, not a duty, and power decides. By converting a private moral failure into a declarative boundary, Simon forges the wound that the novel will keep pressing, ensuring that every act of love or hatred that follows is measured against this exclusion.