Vulnerability and Manipulation
What This Theme Explores
Megan Goldin’s Stay Awake asks how easily a life can be rewritten when memory, the mind’s anchor, is cut loose. The novel centers on how predators exploit psychological, emotional, and situational fragility—especially when a victim’s credibility can be undermined. Through Liv Reese, whose memory resets whenever she sleeps, the book probes the mechanics and ethics of control: Who gets to define reality when one person cannot remember it? And what forms can manipulation take—from overt gaslighting to “protective” control that still strips away agency?
How It Develops
At first, Liv’s vulnerability is intimate and bewildering: she wakes in strange places, piecing together a self from scraps and ink on her skin. Her condition exposes her to small-scale social dismissal—most notably when the couple now living in her old apartment belittle her as a “nut job” to force her out, a cruel shove that weaponizes her confusion and disorientation (Chapter 28). These early moments show how stigma and impatience create fertile ground for exploitation.
As the mystery deepens, manipulation escalates from social pressure to psychological warfare. The anonymous caller—later revealed as Brett Graham—learns to steer Liv’s fear, planting guilt and false memories to make her doubt her innocence. Meanwhile, Ted Cole steps in as a would-be savior whose methods—secrecy, confinement, controlling information—mirror the structures of coercion, even if his motives are protective. Liv becomes a contested narrative space, with multiple forces competing to author her reality.
By the climax, manipulation turns lethal. Brett’s scheme relies entirely on Liv’s known medical condition: he engineers crime scenes, murders, and planted evidence so that her amnesia will make her the perfect suspect. The theme peaks when Liv must resist not only Brett’s constructed story but also the internalized self-doubt his manipulation has cultivated, reclaiming agency in a world determined to deny her a coherent past.
Key Examples
The novel’s exploration of vulnerability and manipulation crystallizes in moments where language, setting, and strategy conspire to control Liv’s sense of truth.
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Liv’s amnesia as an exploitable weakness
Her body becomes a battlefield, and the messages on her hands are both armor and bullseye—defenses that also broadcast her fragility to onlookers and predators. The notes preserve a thread of continuity, but they also mark her as someone whose reality can be edited by others.Near my wrist it says: DON’T SLEEP! I FORGET EVERYTHING WHEN I FALL ASLEEP.
I’ve underlined it twice for emphasis. I fell asleep right here on this park bench. I can’t help but wonder what I’ve forgotten. -
The caller’s gaslighting as psychological siege
Brett’s calls are rehearsals in control: he frames questions to produce fear, pushes Liv to fill in blanks with worst-case scenarios, and reiterates her amnesia until it becomes a weapon against her. Each prompt nudges her toward a false confession she internalizes.“Don’t tell me that you fell asleep again! Did you, Liv? Did you fall asleep?”
I don’t respond.
“Where did you wake up this time? Tell me, Liv.” I sense that he’s whispering to disguise his voice.
“I woke up on the subway,” I concede.
“You don’t remember what happened last night, do you?”
“No.”
“I thought so. You forget everything every time you fall asleep.” -
Ted’s protective control and the ethics of care
Ted’s “safe house” imposes isolation, secrecy, and obedience—the same tools abusers use, now justified as protection. The novel complicates care by showing how safety can become a euphemism for disempowerment when it denies informed choice.He tells her, “I can’t stress enough that you can’t go out and you can’t contact anyone... It’s for your own protection” (Chapter 51).
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Brett’s endgame: framing through forgetfulness
Brett’s confession reveals manipulation as a system: exploit the amnesia, engineer the optics, and let institutional bias do the rest. His plan presumes that a woman with memory loss will be disbelieved, aligning personal cruelty with social prejudice.“I always knew your memory would come back. That’s why I had to kill your ex last night and frame you as the killer. I figured when you were found with his body, they’d pin Amy and Marco’s murders on you, too. It would get me off the hook for good.”
Character Connections
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Liv Reese
Liv embodies the precariousness of identity when memory is fragile. Her arc tracks a shift from being a text others annotate to becoming her own author again, trusting intuition and assembled clues over externally imposed narratives. -
Brett Graham
Brett is the novel’s purest manipulator, a strategist who treats Liv’s condition as a loophole in moral accountability. He engineers people’s perceptions—police, friends, and Liv herself—demonstrating how control operates through stories as much as through violence. -
Ted Cole
Ted complicates the binary of predator/protector. His affection is genuine, but his methods echo coercive tactics, forcing readers to ask whether care that curtails agency ultimately reinforces the same structures that abusers exploit. -
Detective Krause
Krause’s tunnel vision is institutional manipulation: he shapes evidence to fit a tidy narrative of Liv’s guilt, sidelining context about her vulnerability and contradicting leads (Chapter 43). His certainty shows how systems can amplify individual exploitation by preferring convenient stories over complicated truths.
Symbolic Elements
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The messages on Liv’s hands
These notes are self-authored lifelines—a portable archive resisting erasure. Yet they also signal her condition to opportunists, proving how the very tools of survival can expose someone to further control. -
The black paint
When Brett paints over the walls of Liv’s basement apartment, he performs a literal erasure of her memory-work and investigation. The act enacts narrative domination: overwriting her story with his cover-up (Chapter 57). -
The knife
As the planted murder weapon, the knife becomes a conduit for transferred guilt. In Brett’s hands, it is both instrument and accusation—a prop meant to make Liv hold the story of his crimes. -
Locked rooms and “safe houses”
Spaces billed as protective double as prisons, demonstrating how control often masquerades as care. These settings externalize the theme: walls that keep dangers out also keep agency in.
Contemporary Relevance
Stay Awake resonates in a world conversant with gaslighting, misinformation, and the stigma around mental health. Liv’s discredited perspective mirrors how survivors of coercive control are doubted, their realities revised by abusers and institutions alike. The novel’s anxiety about memory’s instability echoes our broader crisis of truth—where narratives can be curated to manipulate perception—and underscores the urgent need to center consent, credibility, and patient, trauma-informed listening.
Essential Quote
“I always knew your memory would come back. That’s why I had to kill your ex last night and frame you as the killer. I figured when you were found with his body, they’d pin Amy and Marco’s murders on you, too. It would get me off the hook for good.”
This confession distills the theme’s mechanics: exploitation of a known vulnerability, manipulation of narrative optics, and reliance on systemic bias to seal the frame-up. Brett’s matter-of-fact tone underscores how manipulation thrives not on brilliance but on the predictable failures of trust and verification—turning Liv’s memory loss into a weapon against her.