51 pages • 1 hour read
Ashley PostonThe Dead Romantics
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 34-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 34 Summary: “Ghosts in the Floorboards”
Florence recalls how she buried her childhood writing under the floorboards. She opens the box and finds a letter from her dad telling her he knew she wrote the Ann Nichols books and that he’s proud of her.
Alice reveals that their dad left Alice the business.
Florence feels connected to the girl she once was, the girl who believes in grand gestures and true love and happily-ever-afters.
Rose enters to announce that Ben woke up from his coma. Florence cries at the thought that Ben is alive and that she might love him.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Unruly Hearts”
Florence flies back to New York and goes to the hospital to visit Ben. A woman who looks like Ann Nichols rides the elevator with her. Florence runs into Lee Marlowe in the lobby. Laura, Ben’s former fiancée, is in Ben’s room with him, and Florence hears Ben laughing. Lee says Ben might give Laura a second chance. Florence fears that this is not her love story, after all. When Florence asks why Lee didn’t ask her for a second chance, he says she didn’t want her to be jealous of him. Florence punches him in the face and then goes home to her apartment to finish her book.
Chapter 36 Summary: “Lovely Meeting”
The chapter begins with the scene Florence is writing. She writes for three months and finishes the draft, edits and polishes, and turns it in. In those three months, Carver proposes to his boyfriend Nicki, and Alice flirts with Rose. Ann’s agent offers Florence representation. Ben emails to say it was a pleasure working with her. Florence doesn’t know if he remembers anything that passed between them when he was incorporeal. Rose says Florence should give Ben a signed copy of her book. Florence schedules a meeting with him Friday, right before she’s due to fly to Mairmont for Carver and Nicki’s wedding. Florence dresses in her red Converses and jeans with a hole in the knee, which makes her feel like herself, and heads to Ben’s office.
Chapter 37 Summary: “The Dead Romantics”
Florence notices Ben is dressed in a suit, his hair is longer, and he has a scar on his face. She reminds herself that she is going to be okay. They talk about the manuscript and when he makes a reference to her coffee, calling it “zoom-zoom juice,” Florence wonders how much he remembers. Nervous, she gives him the book and tries to leave, but he asks her to wait. He thought he had dreamed being a ghost, but when he kisses her, he realizes he didn’t. Florence invites him to come home with her for the weekend, and he agrees.
Chapter 38 Summary: “Body of Work”
Florence takes Ben to her old room at the B&B in Mairmont and they make love. Florence is pleased to find that Ben has a very fit physique, since he likes to swim. They are discussing what they should call their relationship when Rose and Alice barge in, on their way to the bachelor party. Florence and Ben stay in bed.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Ghost Stories”
Ben helps Florence arrange flowers for the wedding and meets the rest of the family in his physical form. Seeing her family happy at the wedding, Florence feels “a good sort of pain” (340). Florence and Ben dance, and Florence sees the ghost of an older woman at the edge of the floor, the woman she delivered flowers to. Her husband is waiting to embrace her, and Ben can see them too. Florence isn’t alone with her gift any longer.
She and Ben walk to the cemetery to visit her father’s grave, and Florence feels she’s going to be okay. She and Ben declare that they belong to one another, and they kiss. Florence reflects on their love story, thinking: “We were an author of love stories and an editor of romances, weaving a story about a boy who was once a little ghostly and a girl who lived with ghosts. And maybe, if we were lucky, we’d find a happily ever after, too” (344).
Epilogue Summary: Eccentric Circles
Florence says she no longer stores her dreams in a box beneath the floorboards of the Days Gone Funeral Home. However, there is a tall and lanky girl with dark hair and wide eyes who finds her mother’s old fanfic and decides to store her dreams in that box, too, while the wind sings through the old funeral parlor.
Chapter 34-Epilogue Analysis
These chapters move Florence to her happy ending by finding a way she can reunite with Ben after all: He’s been in a coma, not dead, and that explains why he occasionally heard voices and other sounds. Paralleling and reinforcing Florence’s reinvigorated belief in romance is the developing affair between Rose and Alice and marriage plans between Carver and Nicki. Carver and Nicki’s marriage provides a contrast to Xavier’s funeral and brings the family together in celebration—this time integrating Ben in his corporeal form.
Florence is reaffirmed that Ben is the one for her by the knowledge that he can see ghosts, too. Unlike Lee, Ben will never pity Florence or be alarmed by her gift, but will be able to join her in it, just as he supports her belief in romance. Unlike most others in her life, he knows who she ghostwrites for, and in this way also he is integrated with her family.
Florence makes peace with her love of writing and her romantic childhood self when she finds the letter from her father with the juvenilia she buried beneath the floorboards. In excavating the box, Florence resurrects and makes peace with her younger self, the one she tried to bury and leave behind in the prologue. This box will later provide a connection to the dark-haired girl of the Epilogue—presumably Ben and Florence’s daughter—who will write her own stories and bury them just where her mother did.
This section emphasizes The Importance of Following One’s Dreams. In reclaiming her younger self—the self who believes in love and romance and who happily writes about it—Florence is able to finish her book. She is in tune with her characters, who are trying to find themselves and one another in love. She also stands up for herself with Lee, and transcends her experience of being abandoned and betrayed.
In romance novels, protagonists typically go through a healing period before they are ready to embrace true love. When Ben wakes up from his coma, Florence isn’t ready to claim him—she has to finish the manuscript first, thus completing the unfinished business between them. However, she is ready to claim herself. This makes her a whole, healed person ready for real love, which she demonstrates when she gifts her book—the one under her own name and that represents so much of herself—to Ben. Instead of a prickly cactus, she is giving him her heart.
In bringing the physical version of Ben to Mairmont to meet her family and join in the wedding celebrations, Florence reintegrates both parts of her life. She has succeeded in love and is sexually satisfied with Ben, who repays Florence for the frustration of not being able to touch him earlier. She has also succeeded in her career, proven by her successfully fulfilling her contract and turning in the fourth book. She gains an offer of representation from Ann’s agent, legitimizing her as Ann’s successor and a successful romance author.
The love story Florence is happiest with, however, is hers and Ben’s. Her thinking of them as the ”boy who was once a little ghostly and [the] girl who lived with ghosts” maintains the novel’s playful attitude toward the supernatural (344). Ending the novel in the cemetery, where they both take a moment to pay their respects at Xavier’s grave, continues the theme that love, death, and life are all stages in a single and continuous process. The Epilogue echoes the Prologue with the image of another young girl who will protect her dreams beneath the floorboard of the funeral parlor; this reaffirms the novel’s theme that stories linger long beyond people.
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By Ashley Poston
