Miles Eisenberg

Quick Facts

A beloved absence at the heart of the novel, Miles Eisenberg is the deceased husband of Wendy Sorenson, an old-money Chicago heir who chose a modest, service-oriented career in academia. He appears only in memory and flashback, yet his death from renal cancer in 2014 defines the present-day story (2016) by shaping Wendy’s grief and volatility. His marriage to Wendy mirrors, in her mind, the epic romance of her parents, Marilyn Sorenson and David Sorenson, making him both a lost partner and a standard of ideal love for the Sorenson clan.

Who They Are

Miles is remembered less for what he looked like than for the way he lived: a gentle, principled academic who refused to let wealth dictate his values. He embodies an “old-money academic” vibe—first-edition Lord of the Rings on the shelf, lectures on economics at a community college—not as affectation but as conviction. In the novel’s present, he survives as the ideal Wendy cannot release: part sanctuary, part prison. To love Miles is to see the best version of partnership—equal, tender, and deeply domestic—and to feel the devastating vacuum that follows its loss.

Personality & Traits

Miles’s portrait emerges entirely through others’ recollections, primarily Wendy’s. What holds constant is his moral clarity and devoted love—a counterweight to Wendy’s chaos that made her feel like part of a coherent “unit.”

• Loving and devoted: Their intimacy is tactile and idiosyncratic—Wendy remembers wanting to “kiss the inside of your elbow,” a micro-image that captures the scale of their closeness and grounds the theme of The Ideal vs. Reality of Love and Marriage.
• Wealthy but unpretentious: Though born into immense Chicago wealth, he chooses meaningful work—teaching community-college economics—because it is “fulfilling,” signaling a values-driven life rather than a performative rejection of privilege.
• Intellectual and principled: Wendy imagines him “railing on the state of public education” and appreciating a sharp student like Jonah Bendt, casting him as a serious thinker who cares about systems and people inside them.
• Supportive partner: In memory, he is the steadying ballast of their marriage; after his death, Wendy moves through the world as if still “a member of a unit,” revealing how much of her identity was braided into his.

Character Journey

Miles does not evolve on the page; he is revealed. Flashbacks trace a full life arc—meeting Wendy, marrying her in the Sorensons’ backyard, the ordinary intimacies of marriage and pregnancy, and then the brutal compression of time around illness and death. In the present, he becomes a fixed star: not a character in motion but a gravitational force. Wendy’s inability to update her memory of him—because the source is gone—keeps him perfect and keeps her stuck. He is both the evidence of what she had and the measure against which everything after must fail.

Key Relationships

• Wendy Sorenson: Miles is the great love of Wendy’s life, the one person who made her feel comprehensively known and steadied. After his death, she continues to address him in nightly deck monologues, confiding, apologizing, and begging for proof she can go on—rituals that keep him emotionally present while preventing true forward motion.
• The Sorenson family: To the boisterous Sorenson clan, Miles reads as a reassuringly normal (if “exorbitantly wealthy”) counterpoint to Wendy’s earlier “blond American Psychos.” He integrates seamlessly, his gentleness amplifying the family’s belief in enduring marriages modeled by Marilyn Sorenson and David Sorenson, and his loss subtly destabilizing that ideal.

Defining Moments

Miles’s life and afterlife in the novel are concentrated into a handful of scenes that reverberate across Wendy’s present.

• Death from renal cancer (2014): The off-screen event that structures the book. It reconfigures Wendy’s identity from wife-in-a-unit to bereaved survivor, catalyzing her grief, anger, and drift.
• Wendy’s backyard wedding (2000): A flashback peak of certainty and joy.
  • “All that mattered was what they knew to be true…”: The reception scene crystallizes their mutual devotion and becomes the memory against which Wendy judges every later relationship and decision.
• Wendy’s rituals on the deck: Present-day scenes of smoking and speaking to Miles maintain intimacy beyond death.
  • These one-sided conversations show how memory functions as both a lifeline and a trap—comforting, repetitive, and resistant to change.

Essential Quotes

"If Miles were here,” Wendy said, “he’d be railing on the state of public education.”

This imagined reaction captures Miles’s principled intellect and social conscience. Even dead, he offers Wendy a moral compass—and a voice she consults when reality feels chaotic.

She’d been doing it since he died. She would talk to him—to some ethereal indication of him that sometimes she felt but most times she didn’t.

The language of “ethereal indication” acknowledges the fragility of grief rituals: they soothe precisely because they are uncertain. The habit shows how Wendy keeps Miles active in her daily life while admitting the tenuousness of that presence.

"I wish I could kiss the inside of your elbow right now,” she whispered, almost inaudibly because the people next door sometimes kept their windows open.

This intimate, almost playful physical detail renders their love in ordinary, domestic terms. It’s not grand gestures but tiny, specific desires that make the loss feel immeasurable.

Somehow she had been without him for nearly two years. She lit her backup cigarette.

The adverb “somehow” compresses time into bewilderment; grief has distorted duration. The “backup cigarette” becomes a small token of endurance—an imperfect coping mechanism that marks the daily labor of going on without him.