Throughout the novel, characters cope with their own grief in different ways, some familiar, others outlandish.

Lisa has experienced an immense amount of tragedy in her life. Ten years before the novel’s events, her fiancé Danny died working as a firefighter in California. A year before, Lisa’s parents and youngest brothers all died tragically within a short period of time. By the end of the novel, it is revealed that Lisa had a son, Harlan, who died recently of cancer. Lisa hasn’t experienced these events in isolation. Rather, they have compounded over time and brought her to a breaking point. In a dissociated state, Lisa enters the world she created as an author, a world in which she still retains control.

Lisa’s grief causes her to hallucinate Purdue into existence along with other events from her novel as a means of coping with the death of her son. When Lisa meets Willow, she believes Willow may be suffering from “Brief reactive psychosis”, a behavior “driven by exhaustion and depression” (184). This moment is significant because it actually describes what Lisa herself is experiencing. Lisa explains, “In the face of severe trauma, the brain could conjure entire worlds that didn’t exist as a way of blocking out reality.