Loneliness

The author establishes and develops her explorations regarding loneliness within her first person narrator Penny’s journey towards self-actualization. McKenzie particularly does so by placing Penny at a point of transition at the novel’s start. In the wake of discovering her husband Sherman’s infidelity, Penny not only decides to leave him, but to quit her job and to abandon Santa Cruz, “the site of [her] most recent failures" (3). Therefore, when she arrives in Santa Barbara in the early pages of Chapter 1, Penny is almost entirely alone. Her isolation in the present, however, is not new. Ever since her parents and sister moved to Australia when she was young, Penny has been without her nuclear family. Although she does live in proximity to her grandparents, she feels more responsibility for them rather than kinship with them. This isolation is further compounded by Penny’s parents...