Joan (Delacourt) Foster

Joan Foster is a writer and married to Arthur Foster, a political radical, professor and writer. Arthur knows very little about Joan’s past and she plans to keep it that way. Throughout the book Joan fights to keep her identity concealed, but this forces her to create elaborate lies which get her into trouble.

Throughout her life, Joan is a different person with every man with which she has a relationship. She changes to meet their approval, savvy enough to know what it is that they want. In many ways Joan seems childlike and at times an unreliable narrator, but it is in her manipulation of self to appease others that suggests she is smarter than she seems. In the end Joan is running from all that she has already run away from in her life. Her lies have trapped her. Finally, she realizes that...