Content Warning: This section of the guide contains explicit descriptions of sexual violence, domestic abuse, suicide, and murder (including the violent death of a child).

The novel asks questions about who has the right to tell the individual’s story via Anna Williams-Bonner’s fraught relationship with fiction and storytelling. Throughout the novel, Anna is desperate for control of her own story and feels exploited when she discovers that both her husband Jake Bonner and her brother Evan Parker have co-opted her coming-of-age story for their own authorial gain. She goes so far as to kill Jake and Evan in order to reclaim authority over her story. Her acts of violence illustrate the lengths the individual might go to in order to protect her story and identity.

When Anna writes The Afterword, she is attempting to claim her story in fiction and to seize control of her own narrative. As a result, she’s lauded for “turn[ing] her heartbreak into art” and “set[ting] her own path, unafraid” for herself (6). She has “never aspired to write so much as a Hallmark card” before penning The Afterword (5), but publishing this novel about her husband’s death by suicide grants Anna a sense of authority over the life and identity she has curated for herself.