Nora Webster

“She knew the story of her life down to her maiden name and the plot in the graveyard where she would be buried.”

Nora knows every detail of May Lacey’s life, from her mother’s maiden name to the place where May will be buried. Nora’s knowledge therefore encompasses the entirety of May’s life, reflecting a form of small-town intimacy that Nora finds frustrating and downright suffocating. Burdened by The Stifling Effects of Small Communities, she resents the fact that everyone around her is just as fully aware of the most private details of her own life.

“I hope to never hear another Rosary.”

To many people in the religious community, prayers such as the Rosary are a comfort, but to Nora, who has experienced death firsthand, these prayers are a reminder of her grief. Because she cannot take comfort from words that remind her of the pain and loss that she has suffered, this ritual becomes, in her eyes, just another unwelcome social convention.

“Did you think they would come home unchanged?”

When Josie poses this abrupt question to Nora about her children, the protagonist realizes that she has become so preoccupied by her grief that she has failed to recognize the similar depths of her children’s pain. Her oversight stems from her faulty reasoning that because her children were not present for Maurice’s decline, they cannot possibly be experiencing her level of devastation.