Broken Bayou

“Accepting good fortune was the hardest thing for me to learn, and I still slip.”

Willa is intelligent, successful, and competent, and she has spent many years unpacking her dysfunctional childhood. In many ways, she feels as though she has left the pain of these years behind her, but there are moments when the past comes back to haunt her. She is still sometimes surprised by her own success and cannot accept the idea that she grew up and moved on and that she deserves happiness.

“Amy and I bonded because of our mothers, hers an alcoholic and mine bipolar.”

Willa is a character defined in part by her struggles with mental health conditions and family dysfunction. She is drawn to people with similar backgrounds, both in her personal and professional lives. Professionally, she works with troubled children and their families, and many of her friends and even her love interests have their own complex and even traumatic pasts.

“I developed a thick skin growing up with Krystal Lynn as my mother and grinding my way through nine years of higher education without any support at home.”

Willa is characterized both by her Survival and Resilience and by the impact that her traumatic childhood continues to have on her. While she struggled to help parent her younger sister because of her mother’s debilitating mental health condition, she also turned her difficulties into a source of motivation. She successfully gave herself more opportunities than her mother had and used her education to help families better serve people with mental health needs and children with autism.

“Runaways think any place is better than home, and sometimes that’s true, but an overwhelming percentage find a place that’s much worse. My heart breaks for this young girl. She needed help, and instead a monster found her. I wonder what her story was. Was it abuse, addiction, both?”

Willa is an empathetic individual. She is able to refrain from judging others, avoid stigma, and identify the pain and difficulty behind problematic behavior. Here, although many people in the public judge this girl for having been a runaway and breaking the law, Willa realizes that her home life must have driven her to run away. She responds to this story with kindness rather than judgment.

“I tell myself to stop diagnosing Travis. He’s not a child, and I’m certainly not his doctor.”

Willa is a keen judge of character, and her psychological training allows her additional insight into human behavior. She does have the tendency to “think like a psychologist” even when she is in social situations, and while this can sometimes be beneficial, it also gets in the way, at times, of meaningful interaction.

“In my late twenties when I thought my years of education made me wise, I told mama I forgave her. She’d said “For what? I did my best.”

Willa’s family dynamics are complex. Both her mother and her grandmother were emotionally volatile, sometimes abusive, and struggled with addiction. Although they did adversely impact their children’s lives, they were also trying to deal with their own trauma. Part of Willa’s personal growth centers around her ability to look beyond their “bad behavior” and approach her mother and grandmother with empathy and understanding. Here, her mother displays what Willa initially would characterize as denial and avoidance, but ultimately realizes is a form of self-understanding.

“That group taunted Travis, called him bayou trash. Said his family was trouble, not necessarily wrong, but cruel none the less.”

Broken Bayou is a place of complex politics and social relations. Despite the community’s general impoverishment, there is a rigid class hierarchy that is, for people like Travis, inescapable. The stigma that his family experiences because of their perceived class status contributes to their family struggles and makes seeking out help for mental health conditions even more difficult.

“It’s no wonder I gravitate towards men who won’t be around long. Patterns can be hard to break, even for someone who gets paid to know better.”

This passage hits at the crux of Willa’s complex, often contradictory characterization. She is both knowledgeable about mental health and mired in her own mental health struggles. Her psychological knowledge does not always translate to self-knowledge. Willa is a work in progress, and ultimately she comes to understand that better and use it to better understand her patients.

“Bullies had been the topic of my first podcast, inspired by the bullies who went after my little sister. She was an easy target. Her stringy blonde hair refused to cover her large ears, and the mean girls at school called her Mouse.”

Willa is a knowledgeable and empathetic psychologist. In her work, she draws inspiration from her own family’s history, hoping that she can bring her expertise and insider’s perspective to bear on the difficulties of managing complex family dynamics. As a girl, she handled bullies by doing her best to intimidate them. As an adult, she knows that this is the wrong tactic, but having engaged in problematic behavior herself, she has more empathy for children trying their best (and sometimes failing) to make the right choices in the moment.

“That family is cursed. Seven boys and one girl. And a mama I wouldn’t trust to watch my cats.”

Broken Bayou’s social hierarchy is a complex tapestry. Although small and close-knit, the town is not without prejudice and discrimination. Travis’s family has long lived with the stigma of being “trash,” and that pejorative has made life even more difficult for a group of individuals who also struggle with mental health and addiction.

“Did your mother at some point drive a red convertible?”

One of this novel’s key focal points is the tendency of secrets to surface—a phenomenon symbolized by the literal surfacing of the submerged convertible. Multiple secrets come to light throughout the course of this narrative, building suspense and fueling a broader conversation about truth, lies, and obfuscation.

“Some people travel with one Xanax, like a security blanket, just in case they have a panic attack. Just knowing it’s there can keep anxiety at bay. I travel with something much more toxic.”

During this scene, Willa self-harms after seeing the security footage of her sister Mabry running over her mother’s boss with her mother’s car. Although Willa has spent years trying to overcome her traumatic childhood and has in many ways succeeded, she has not managed to leave all her harmful coping mechanisms behind. This author explores the complex relationship between mental health, familial relationships, and individual behavior in a nuanced way, and her depiction of Willa speaks to the difficulty of navigating mental health concerns even during periods of relative stability.

“No more pretending. I am an accomplice to something horrific.”

Secrets and lies are at the heart of both this novel’s use of suspense and its broader commentary on the psychological impact of secrecy. Here, Willa is confronted with the truth of one of her family’s key secrets, and she finds it difficult to handle. Coming to terms with truth and the past are part of Willa’s growing process, and moments like this will become critical steps on her path toward healing.

“I think you and I have more in common than you know. Two southern girls who made right despite having the odds stacked against them.” 

This passage describes the foundation of Willa and Rita’s friendship. Although Willa is initially cautious of Rita, she comes to see her as a friend and kindred spirit. Although this novel is full of troubled female characters, they are all in their own way also figures of strength and resilience. Both Willa and Rita prove themselves to be strong in the face of adversity, and they emerge at the end of the novel intact and stronger for the harrowing experience they’ve been through.

“The trickle-down effect of mental illness is toxic to families.”

Many of the characters in this novel struggle with toxic family dynamics. Willa, Travis, Amy, and others come from families whose habits and norms are deeply unhealthy. Willa will have to find her own way to move past her family trauma in order to heal. She does this in part through her professional work with children, but also through her own commitment to therapy and journey of self-discovery.

“Of course, you’re just like her. Your mama was just as troubled as you are.”

This line, spoken by Willa’s aunt, reveals The Generational Impact of Inadequate Mental Health Resources. Willa’s mother’s mental health challenges are rooted in her own mother’s behavior, and this trauma in turn has passed down to Willa herself. Each woman is just one in a long history of difficulty. This kind of information helps Willa to better understand herself but also to better meet her clients’ needs. Because of her own experiences, she is able to contextualize behavior and, even more importantly, to refrain from stigmatizing it. Her mother might have been difficult to live with, but she was also playing out her own past traumas, too.

“I live for stories. I live for research. And Emily Arceneaux isn’t the only person I’ve been researching lately.”

These lines, spoken by Rita Meade, help to paint a fuller portrait of her character. She is hardworking and knowledgeable, but also tenacious in her pursuit of a good story. Willa observes that she is an honest woman motivated not by an interest in personal glory but by a commitment to truth in reporting. Rita herself notes key similarities between her character and Willa’s, and taken together the two women are part of the author’s interest in depicting strong, resilient female characters.

“Here I am at the top of my game, a successful podcast, a new self-help book, and a phone full of calls to my dead sister’s voicemail. I even kept her phone. It has become a sort of talisman, another unhealthy thing I am not ready to let go of.”

This moment marks both a major revelation within the narrative and a key piece of information about Willa’s character. Although she’d previously characterized her relationship with her sister Mabry as strained, she has just revealed that Mabry died by suicide. Willa cannot let go of her and continues to call, leaving messages on Mabry’s voicemail. This and other unhealthy coping mechanisms haunt Willa in spite of her years of therapy and self-improvement. She is, in many ways, a study in contradictions and a commentary on the complexity of identity: She is both resilient and scarred, self-aware and in denial.

“Being a cop is all I know. It’s everything to me.”

Travis’s career is important to him as an adult, but his career path began, like Willa’s, in childhood. Both came from troubled families with histories of mental illness and addiction. Both worked hard to become healthy and functional adults. They are further connected by their shared interest in careers that help people in need. Before she discovers that he is the serial killer, Willa believes that, like her, Travis is trying to provide to others the kind of assistance that his family needed, but never received.

“This could involve my family. I’m handling it.”

This line is a key moment of foreshadowing. Although Travis seems to be referring to his brother Doyle’s possible role in the barrel murders, he is in fact referring to his own guilt and his intent to “clean up” his mess. Willa now doubts Doyle’s guilt, and that fact combined with this cryptic statement are subtle clues that Travis might be the true killer.

“My mind refuses to connect the monster in front of me with the boy who once captured my heart.”

Willa is shocked to learn that Travis is the true killer, but the way that she ruminates on his sociopathy will provide her with important wisdom to take away from this experience. She understands that sociopathy is both born and cultivated, and that a genetic predisposition to sociopathic tendencies combined with an abusive, unstable childhood can push an individual “across the line” toward the kind of violence that characterizes Travis. Although Travis did fool her, she emerges from her ordeal with a better understanding of another complex facet of the human psyche, and the assumption is that this information will be useful to her in her work going forward.

“Our little Emily is going to get one more friend after all.”

These chilling lines speak to Travis’s characterization and reveal his true nature. He is a cold-blooded killer and a sociopath, and his greatest feat has been to convince everyone around him that he is an upstanding citizen. Travis’s ability to conceal his sociopathy speaks to this novel’s interest in The Psychological Impact of Secrets, but also to the idea that secrets never stay buried forever.

“My body has healed since that night in Broken Bayou. My bones are strong again, but my mind still reels.”

Willa is characterized both by her commitment to mental health and her struggles with it. By the end of the novel, however, she has left her unhealthy coping mechanisms behind and is fully engaged in trauma therapy. Here, she acknowledges that she still struggles with traumatic memories, but the fact that she is trying to move beyond them in a healthy manner is a sign that she has undergone real, meaningful growth.