How to Kill Your Family

Grace is, in many ways, a quintessential feminist thriller narrator. She is highly intelligent—though not as intelligent as she thinks she is—and her frequent literary allusions and arcane vocabulary suggest that she wishes to be perceived as such. In the Prologue alone, she uses words like froideur, sartorial, and prosaic instead of more common or well-known synonyms like reserve, fashion, and mundane. Grace also alludes to the crime novels of Dick Francis, some very famous and some not-so-famous serial killers, and the theory of Occam’s Razor. Despite her relative youth, Grace’s breadth of knowledge and ability to identify similarities among varied circumstances, situations, and individuals demonstrates her mental dexterity. Her overweening pride and disavowal of remorse also help to align Grace with other thriller protagonists, feminist or otherwise. She believes that, were the public to learn of her crimes, they “would reel. After all, almost nobody else in the world can possibly understand how someone, by the tender age of 28, can have calmly killed six members of her family” (5). Grace thinks of herself as uniquely superior in intellect, strength, and—ironically—moral character, to the general populace and, certainly, to her immediate circle.

In addition, Grace’s disgust with the social structure and institutions that empower men, to the detriment of women, aligns her with some 21st-century feminist values.