Although the narrative calls attention to the Adam’s marriages to Robin and then Amelia, Feeney describes many different types of relationships. The author closely examines father-daughter and mother-son relationships through Henry and Robin, and through Adam and his mother, respectively. Feeney depicts protégé-mentor bonding through Henry and Adam and the friendship through Robin and Amelia. The one constant in each of these pairings is that they fail.

Robin and Amelia’s close friendship instantly disintegrates when Robin finds her friend in bed with her husband. The working dynamic of Henry and Adam, Feeney reveals, was tainted by falsehood from the beginning, when Robin secretly asked Henry to let Adam adapt one of his novels. Although Adam doesn’t find this out until near the end of the story, he learns from a TV interview that Henry never cared for his adaptions. Adam, deceptively, doesn’t bring the interview up when he retaliates by refusing to adapt anymore of Henry’s novels. Adam’s relationship with his mother was conflicted before her death by her attempts to portray her constant stream of lovers as merely friends. Similarly, Robin can’t accept her father’s claim that her mother accidentally drowned in the bathtub.