Elisabeth

Quick Facts

• Role: Older sister to Alice Love; parallel narrator via therapy “homework”
• First appearance: At the hospital after Alice’s accident, taking charge and shielding her
• Occupation: Owner of a direct-mail training business; hyper-competent, organized, and exacting
• Age: 39 during the events of the novel
• Key relationships: Alice; husband Ben; honorary grandmother Frannie; therapist Dr. Hodges; daughter Francesca

Who She Is

Elisabeth is the novel’s grounded, aching counterpoint to Alice’s whimsical amnesia—a woman whose competence hides a body and psyche marked by years of infertility treatments. Her journal entries to Dr. Hodges expose a mind that’s razor-sharp, funny, and brutally honest, even as bitterness and grief threaten to calcify her identity. Through Elisabeth, the book makes intimate the theme of Infertility and the Longing for Family: she longs for a child with a ferocity that reorganizes her marriage, her sisterhood, and her sense of self. In tracing her brittle self-protection softening into hope, Elisabeth also embodies the painful, ongoing work of Transformation of the Self.

Personality & Traits

Elisabeth moves through the world with brisk authority—organizing, deciding, protecting. But the more she tries to control her life, the more infertility exposes the limits of her power, leaving her feeling humiliated by her own body. Her voice on the page blends dark humor with candor; in person, she often armors herself in sarcasm and a clipped tone to keep others at bay.

• Protective and loyal: She instinctively becomes Alice’s “shield” after the accident, filtering information and managing logistics so her sister won’t be overwhelmed—an old family role that reasserts itself immediately.
• Assertive and capable: A successful business owner and decisive problem-solver; Alice’s internal mantra, “What would Elisabeth do?” shows how her competence inspires and intimidates in equal measure.
• Wounded and envious: Years of miscarriages and failed IVF leave her feeling “defined” by damage; Alice’s “effortlessly fertile” life becomes a painful mirror that strains their bond.
• Control-seeking: Order and plans comfort her; infertility enrages her precisely because it refuses to yield to effort, money, or willpower.
• Self-aware but guarded: Her therapist journals are sharp, witty, and unsparing; face-to-face she uses briskness and barbed humor to conceal tenderness.
• Physically worn: Described as a “puffed-out version” of her younger athletic self, with “fine spidery lines” and eyes that seem “smaller and paler”—a visible ledger of hormonal treatments, sleepless grief, and vigilance.

Character Journey

At the outset, Elisabeth is desiccated by grief—a woman who jokes that she feels like a “dried apricot” because joking is safer than crying. Alice’s amnesia forces her to narrate the last decade aloud, and in doing so, to re-see it: the cycles of hope and loss, the simmering resentment toward her sister, the erosion of tenderness with Ben. The public “coffee shop” unraveling jolts her into therapy, where she slowly untangles shame from sorrow and confronts long-standing assumptions about adoption and motherhood. Honest conversations with Ben restore the possibility of partnership. Ultimately, Francesca’s birth is not a magic erasure but a hard-won opening—proof that healing requires truth-telling, humility, and the courage to start again, aligning Elisabeth’s arc with the novel’s insistence on Forgiveness and Second Chances.

Key Relationships

• Alice Love: Once inseparable sisters, they’ve drifted into brittle politeness. Elisabeth’s envy and Alice’s obliviousness form a painful loop; Alice’s accident breaks it, allowing Elisabeth to protect her without resentment and to confess the full story of her losses, which restores intimacy.
• Ben: Quiet, steady, and worn down by years on the infertility roller coaster. Their near-breakdown over misunderstood views on adoption exposes how grief turned them into careful roommates; choosing candor reanimates their marriage and sets the stage for Francesca.
• Frannie: An anchoring, old-fashioned presence whose steadiness Elisabeth sometimes resists but ultimately relies on. In crisis, Frannie’s calm offers the safe harbor Elisabeth cannot manufacture for herself.
• Dr. Hodges: More than a clinician, he’s the silent addressee of Elisabeth’s most vulnerable voice. Writing to him gives her language for inchoate feelings—humor softens the edges, but the truth still gets through.

Defining Moments

Elisabeth’s story pivots on a handful of scenes where her private anguish erupts into action—and, crucially, into change.

• The ultrasound revelation: Alice “remembers” a technician saying, “There is no heartbeat,” a memory that turns out to belong to Elisabeth. Why it matters: It literalizes their entangled lives and underlines how Elisabeth’s grief has been both witnessed and, devastatingly, forgotten.
• The coffee shop incident: In a moment of despair, she briefly walks away with a stranger’s toddler. Why it matters: Hitting rock bottom shatters her denial and propels her into therapy, converting shame into a starting point.
• The adoption fight with Ben: A searing argument reveals years of crossed wires about their path to parenthood. Why it matters: It transforms blame into clarity; once they speak plainly, partnership becomes possible again.
• Francesca’s birth: After repeated IVF failures and miscarriages, Elisabeth finally holds her daughter. Why it matters: It’s not a cure-all, but it reintroduces joy and reweaves bonds with Ben and Alice, proving she can be more than her wounds.

Essential Quotes

I feel like a piece of dried fruit. Yes, that’s it. I AM A DRIED APRICOT, Dr. Hodges. Not one of those nice, soft, juicy ones, but a hard, shriveled, tasteless dried apricot that hurts your jaw. This image captures Elisabeth’s self-perception at rock bottom—funny, self-lacerating, and tactile. The grotesque specificity (“hurts your jaw”) turns metaphor into sensation, showing how chronic grief inhabits the body as much as the mind.

You want to know the first thing she said to me, Dr. Hodges? She said, “Oh Libby, what happened to you?” I told you, it defines me. Alice’s startled pity becomes a mirror Elisabeth can’t escape, confirming her fear that loss is the headline of her identity. The clipped “it defines me” blends resignation and rage—the way others look at her has begun to harden into who she believes she is.

I was thinking to myself, “Please don’t mention Roger’s name, Mum. She can’t take another shock. Her brain might explode.” Deadpan humor does triage here: Elisabeth shields Alice while deflecting her own anxiety with a joke. The line compresses family stress into a single beat, revealing her protective instincts and her habit of managing chaos with wit.

I miss the old Nick and Alice. When I think of them standing in that kitchen, putting candles on the cake, it’s like remembering people who I once knew, who moved to another country and didn’t keep in touch. Elisabeth mourns not only unborn children but also vanished versions of the people she loves. The emigration metaphor captures the isolating drift of adulthood and resentment—distance without closure, absence without death.

I don’t want to be a mother anymore, Jeremy. A mother. A mother. A mother. A mother. Sounds like smother. It’s a weird word. I don’t even know why I’m crying. This is exhaustion made audible: repetition erodes the word until it becomes strange, even threatening (“smother”). Addressing her therapist by name breaks her practiced irony; the tears she can’t account for expose the subterranean grief she’s finally allowing to surface.