CHARACTER
The Pushby Ashley Audrain

Blythe Connor

Blythe Connor

Quick Facts

  • Role: Protagonist and first-person narrator whose manuscript addresses her estranged husband, Fox
  • First appearance: Prologue
  • Family: Husband Fox Connor; children Violet Connor and Sam Connor; mother Cecilia; grandmother Etta
  • Other key figures: Mrs. Ellington (surrogate maternal figure); Gemma (Fox’s affair)
  • Function in the novel: Unreliable lens into the terrors and taboos of motherhood

Who They Are

At her core, Blythe Connor is a woman trying to mother without a blueprint. Abandoned emotionally and practically by the women who raised her, she enters motherhood determined to end the cycle—only to fear she’s reproducing it. As the architect and narrator of the book’s epistolary structure, she shapes our reality, but her grief, trauma, and longing complicate everything we see. Blythe personifies The Dark Side of Motherhood: the unspeakable questions about love, instinct, and the possibility that a child may be unreachable—or dangerous.

Personality & Traits

Blythe’s voice is sharp, perceptive, and relentlessly self-interrogating. She is empathetic yet mistrustful of her own instincts, oscillating between vigilance and vulnerability. Much of her personality is a reaction to a legacy of abandonment, and her clarity as a writer coexists with the distortions of trauma.

  • Haunted and fearful: Shaped by Nature vs. Nurture and Generational Trauma, Blythe internalizes her mother’s warning—“The women in this family . . . we’re different”—as a curse. After Violet’s birth, she sees her face turn “angry and tired,” a mirror of Cecilia “right before she left me” (Chapter 16), and fears she’s destined to fail her child.
  • Isolated and anxious: Dismissed by Fox and alienated from “perfect” mothers, Blythe’s world shrinks into hypervigilance and doubt, a pattern tied to Perception, Reality, and Gaslighting. The “Screaming Incident” (Chapter 17), when Fox finds her writing as Violet cries, becomes proof to him that she’s unfit—and proof to her that no one will believe her.
  • Intelligent and observant: As a writer, she records details with precision—Violet’s calculated stillness, a small trip at the playground, the feel of the house at night. But her observations are always shadowed by the possibility of misreadings, especially around Elijah’s fall (Chapter 29), where what she “sees” may be filtered through exhaustion, fear, and need.
  • Yearning for connection: Blythe’s longing for a bond she never had animates her life. She clings to fleeting recognition—“For the first time in her life I think our daughter looks like me” (Prologue)—and later finds the effortless reciprocity she dreamed of with Sam, whose affection briefly convinces her that she can be the mother she hoped to be.

Character Journey

Blythe begins determined to rewrite her family story—love Fox, have a baby, do it right. Violet’s birth cracks that resolve. The disconnection she feels is immediate and terrifying, and each attempt to voice concern is rebuffed by Fox, deepening a spiral of doubt and self-recrimination. As small incidents accrue, her private conviction that Violet is not merely difficult but cruel collides with Fox’s insistence that the problem is Blythe, hastening a devastating Marital Breakdown and Betrayal.

Sam’s arrival briefly rescues her from the abyss: he meets her gaze, returns her touch, and confirms a version of motherhood that feels organic and loving. His death obliterates that fragile identity. Convinced Violet is responsible, Blythe loses her marriage, her son, and the credibility she worked to claim. By the final pages, she’s alone outside Fox’s new home, still seeking acknowledgment—and still uncertain whether what she’s seen is truth or the shape of her wounds.

Key Relationships

  • Violet Connor: Blythe’s relationship with Violet is the novel’s pressure point. From infancy, Blythe reads Violet’s indifference and manipulations as evidence of menace; whether these readings are accurate or trauma-tinted becomes the book’s central uncertainty. The final window scene (“I pushed him,” Chapter 85) fuses fear and confirmation into an image that is both chilling and fundamentally ambiguous.

  • Fox Connor: Fox is first the partner who believes in a bright future, then the skeptic who believes the worst of Blythe. His steady dismissal of her concerns—culminating in the “Screaming Incident” and later in his affair with Gemma—erodes her sanity and turns her manuscript into a plea for recognition as much as an account of events.

  • Sam Connor: With Sam, Blythe experiences embodied, intuitive mothering: eye contact, easy affection, mutual joy. His presence affirms that her instincts can be trustworthy—and his death devastates that certainty, recasting her life as a before-and-after.

  • Cecilia: Blythe’s mother teaches her abandonment by example. Cecilia’s own damage—rooted in Etta’s neglect—makes Blythe both sympathetic to her past and terrified of repeating it; every misstep with Violet feels like destiny closing in.

  • Mrs. Ellington: As a neighbor who offers warmth and steadiness, Mrs. Ellington becomes Blythe’s template for what maternal care can feel like. Blythe measures her own failures against this memory, intensifying both her hope and her shame.

Defining Moments

Blythe’s story unfolds as a series of ruptures—each one tightening the question of whether she’s perceiving danger or inventing it.

  • Violet’s Birth (Chapter 9): After a traumatic labor, Blythe feels only dread when Violet is placed on her chest. Why it matters: It sets the emotional baseline of disconnection that Blythe will later interpret as fate rather than circumstance.
  • The Screaming Incident (Chapter 17): Fox finds Blythe writing with headphones while Violet screams. Why it matters: This cements Fox’s narrative of Blythe as negligent, silencing her voice in the household and accelerating her isolation.
  • Elijah’s Death at the Playground (Chapter 29): Blythe believes she sees Violet trip a boy who then falls to his death. Why it matters: It is the moment her private fear crystallizes into a fixed belief, though the scene’s ambiguity also deepens her unreliability.
  • Sam’s Death (Chapter 44): After Violet yanks Blythe’s arm, hot tea spills; the stroller rolls into traffic, and Sam is killed. Blythe becomes convinced Violet pushed it. Why it matters: The novel’s emotional and moral breaking point—Blythe loses her son, marriage, and any shared truth.
  • Final Confrontation (Chapter 85): Outside Fox’s new home, Blythe sees Violet mouth, “I pushed him.” Why it matters: The ending offers possible confirmation of Blythe’s fears while preserving doubt, forcing readers to wrestle with belief, blame, and the limits of perception.

Essential Quotes

This is my side of the story.
— Blythe Connor, Prologue

Blythe opens by asserting authorship—and partiality. The line frames the novel as testimony rather than fact, reminding readers that every detail is curated by someone fighting to be believed.

"One day you’ll understand, Blythe. The women in this family . . . we’re different."
— Cecilia, Chapter 1

Cecilia’s prophecy becomes Blythe’s gravitational center. Whether warning, curse, or self-justification, it primes Blythe to interpret her own maternal struggles as inheritance rather than circumstance, biasing every later judgment.

I thought about ways to get out. There, in the dark, my milk flowing, the chair rocking. I thought about putting her down in the crib and leaving in the middle of the night. About how much cash I could take out from the ATM at once. About leaving my phone there on the bedside table. How long my milk would take to go dry, for my breasts to give up the proof she had been born.
— Blythe Connor, Chapter 13

This passage voices taboo thoughts with startling concreteness. Blythe’s specificity—ATM limits, drying milk—makes her desperation bodily and real, challenging idealized myths of instant, unconditional maternal love.

I couldn’t tell you the truth: that I believed there was something wrong with our daughter. You thought the problem was me.
— Blythe Connor, Chapter 22

Here Blythe names the chasm between her perception and Fox’s. The line encapsulates the novel’s epistemic struggle: who gets to define reality inside a family, and what happens when that power is denied.

I do not spend my days wondering who we could have been. Or what life would be like if she had died instead of him. I am not a monster, and neither is she.
— Blythe Connor, Chapter 54

Blythe resists the simplest versions of herself and Violet. The refusal to demonize either of them sustains the novel’s moral complexity: even at her most grief-stricken, Blythe acknowledges the abyss between feeling and action, fear and fact.