53 pages • 1 hour read
Kiley ReidCome and Get It
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Dormitory Rooms
Belgrade Dormitory is both the central setting of Come and Get It and a symbol of Navigating the Social Dynamics of Communal Living. Its room arrangement is symbolic of the intimate yet socially exclusive dynamics found in communal university spaces. Kennedy’s single room is located in between the double room occupied by Tyler and Peyton. Through the walls, she can hear conversations on either side yet feel excluded by both. Tyler and Peyton, meanwhile, maintain a peaceful coexistence that they leverage to fulfill their needs. Though they aren’t friends, Tyler considers Peyton the better roommate because she feels she won’t encroach on her personal space, unlike Kennedy.
Meanwhile, the resident assistants, including Millie, occupy rooms adjacent to the suite. Millie’s proximity to the suitemates and access to their conversations gives her the ability to exercise her authority over them. However, when she leverages her proximity for Agatha’s approval, her room also becomes symbolic of abuses of authority. This allows Reid to draw an irony around Millie’s character, placing her in a position where she is most capable of preventing the issues from escalating to crisis but having her fail to render her duty, nonetheless.
Money
Money is a symbol of power, loyalty, and exploitation in the novel. When Millie receives money from Agatha in Chapter 1, she immediately leverages her knowledge of Tyler and her friends to gain Agatha’s approval. Chapter 2 reveals that Millie also received money from Tyler, albeit unexpectedly, after Millie fulfills Tyler’s request to switch Kennedy and Peyton’s room placements. Millie’s needs are directly tied to her access to money. Because she is an authority figure at Belgrade Dormitory, her decisions are influenced by the opportunity to gain money. In her interactions with both Agatha and Tyler, she hesitates to accept the money, especially from Tyler. She is cautious about the possibility of abusing her authority but figures that these transactions are small enough to be innocuous and negligible. When she becomes resentful of Tyler after the prank, Millie sells her proximity to Tyler to Agatha, allowing them to form their arrangement. After their relationship turns romantic, Agatha offers to stop visiting Belgrade so that Millie doesn’t resent her for taking advantage of Millie’s position, but Millie declines. The novel ends with Agatha giving Millie the money to make the down payment, essentially erasing her need for it and, consequently, the mechanism that allows others to exploit her.
Nonfiction Writing
Nonfiction writing is a motif that develops Crossing Personal and Professional Boundaries as one of the novel’s central thematic concerns. Because most of the nonfiction writing depicted leans towards memoir, profile, and personal essay writing, Reid shows how the line between private and public lives can be easily blurred. As a journalist, Agatha Paul is held to a set of ethical standards that are meant to protect the privacy and integrity of her subjects. However, those lines are crossed multiple times when Agatha fails to inform her subjects at Belgrade about the change in her project. She often alludes to the fact that Tyler, Millie, and the other girls gave their consent to be interviewed, but none of them know what form their words will take until long after they have appeared online.
Writing is also used to point toward The Complexities of New Adulthood when it is deployed in Kennedy’s narrative. For Kennedy, writing about her life enables her to process and move past its messier parts. She wants to study nonfiction with Agatha Paul so that she can make something beautiful of her pain the same way Agatha does with hers in her first book, Satellite Grief. But when Kennedy fails to enter Agatha’s workshop, she finds it difficult to reconcile with her personal intentions. She pursues writing primarily for the personal consolation it can offer her, not for its own sake. In this sense, Agatha’s writing workshop is unfit to serve the needs that Kennedy wants her writing to fulfill.
