Things We Do in the Dark

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Butterfly Tattoo

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child abuse, sexual assault, and murder.

In one of the novel’s most emotional moments, a distraught Drew, who arrives at Joey’s apartment to try to apologize for the quarrel they had the night before, is called on by one of the firefighters to identify her body. Drew can stomach only the briefest glance at the blackened remains of the woman he loved. He identifies Joey by the tattoo on her thigh, a butterfly, four by three inches, blue and purple and pink. Significantly, the image suggests that the “butterfly is in flight” (170), frozen in perpetual motion: ever restless and always dodging. Since a butterfly has a short and colorful life, the tattoo suggests that Joey is elusive and that flight is her strategy of choice: a life forever moving away from itself.

That this corpse is not Joey at all but rather the body of Betty Savage is not revealed until much later, when Drew realizes that the two best friends had identical tattoos. The butterfly, he is told, was Joey’s idea. Hillier hence hints at systemic problems: other characters are in flight, too.

The butterfly symbolizes Joey as a transformational character, constantly reinventing herself. Over her 30 years, she has always been evolving, changing, transforming herself, finding in such metamorphosis a strategy for survival. The caterpillar that restlessly evolves into an entirely new shape, a new and beautiful form that seems discontinuous with any previous stage, suggests the logic of Joey herself. She transforms Joey Reyes into someone new, someone to play butterfly to Joey’s worm. The fact that the butterfly is in flight, however, suggests that metamorphosis is not enough; Joey remains restless and in motion until the end of the novel.

Yoga

As she separates herself from the self who is stepping out on the stage of the strip club and executes a stretch that sends the crowd wild, Joey transports herself to her yoga class: “She’d taken up yoga to improve her strength and flexibility, and it allowed her to discipline her mind, to control her body through the exertion of her thoughts. She was never entirely in her body” (210). Yoga plays a critical role in Paris/Joey’s life/lives—it is in her yoga studio that she first meets Jimmy Peralta, who seeks the benefits of yoga as he begins to feel his advancing years. Certain that yoga will allow him the opportunity to control his body, Jimmy seeks out the studio and, in turn, meets Paris Aquino, who has mastered the discipline, control, and dynamics of yoga.

Yoga symbolizes control in a novel in which many characters feel out of control. For Paris, it becomes a way to direct the energies of her body to achieve a transcendent equanimity amid The Traumatic Impact of Abuse. Throughout the novel, Hillier presents Paris knowing how to control her panic by “discipline[ing] her mind” and “control[ling] her body” (210). When Paris feels that the life she has built is threatened, she turns to the discipline of yoga itself: “Constricting her throat just a little, she takes a slow, deep inhale, holds it, then exhales […] After a few ocean breaths—ujjayi breaths—Paris is more clearheaded, more here, as she tries to process how the hell she ended up in the back of a cop car” (6). The practice itself slows the pace of the novel with it, controlling the flow of the narrative in line with her breaths.

Like the books that she reads as a young teenager, like the music she listens to, like her ability to tune into the chorus of croaking frogs outside her bedroom window as her uncle molests her, yoga provides Paris with the illusion of control. Given the grim circumstances of her life, yoga provides her the perception that she is not helpless. Yoga is a spiritual exercise that assures her that her mind, not her body, shapes reality and, consequently, gives her a self-generating and self-sustaining strategy for defusing her anger and calming her anxiety.

“Free Bird,” Lynyrd Skynyrd

Things We Do in the Dark is replete with allusions to a variety of pop culture references: the romantic-suspense novels of Sidney Sheldon, Garfield the cartoon cat, The Bachelor reality show, Timecop, Stephen King’s Needful Things, the Tragically Hip, Pink Floyd, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, the crooning frog in Looney Tunes, The Wizard of Oz, Fraggle Rock, Jimmy Kimmel, and Law & Order. One allusion in particular symbolizes the complicated dynamic of Paris/Joey and speaks to The Consequences of Secrets. When Paris chooses one of Jimmy’s cassettes at random and inserts it into the boom box after she returns home in Chapter 24, she hears the opening bars of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s fierce and defiant “Free Bird.” Caught in her emotions, she sings along in a moment when, as a grieving widow, she feels close to her dead husband: “A sob of grief wells up in her throat, so thick she cannot swallow it back” (181). For the first time, Hillier reveals Paris’s humanity, confusion, and feelings of abandonment and loneliness.

This bird, the singer says defiantly, you cannot tame. But that confidence is balanced in the song by the fear that he will be all too easy to forget. If I leave today, the lyrics ask, will you still remember me? The song then suggests the depth of Paris’s capacity to feel despite her violent secrets and fake identities, as well as the emerging tabloid depiction of her as an unfeeling gold-digger who now stands to inherit a fortune. In the song, the possibility of stable relationships is dismissed because the speaker laments that there is too much still to do. The song both celebrates and laments freedom. Paris identifies with the lonely, free bird, forever eluding commitment and dodging even the possibility of love.

This moment of unguarded honesty, prompted by the song, reveals the true and vulnerable characterization of Paris/Joey when there is no one else around. Offered at a critical midpoint in the novel, the song suggests Paris’s own uncertainty amid her world of secrets.