52 pages • 1 hour read
Laura DaveThe Night We Lost Him
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.
Background
Authorial Context: Laura Dave
Laura Dave is an American author known for both her general fiction and her domestic thrillers. Dave has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, but her interest in writing began in childhood. As an avid reader, she knew early on that she wanted to be a writer and was sharply focused on developing her skills as a storyteller and pursuing a career in professional writing. After earning her MFA, Dave worked as a journalist, publishing short fiction, essays, and other pieces for ESPN, The New Nork Times, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post, and Redbook.
Dave’s novels all feature female protagonists and engage with themes related to family dynamics, romantic relationships, and the search for identity. Her works are character driven, and although they showcase the experiences of women, they often examine familial relationships through the eyes of multiple narrators to provide a more nuanced perspective. Dave is focused on domesticity and everyday life and explores the way that women navigate both big-picture struggles and ordinary, day-to-day experiences. She has written both traditional novels and genre fiction, crafting both literary romances and domestic thrillers.
In 2006, she published London Is the Best City in America, a novel that shares with The Night We Lost Him an interest in fraught family dynamics, sibling relationships, and troubled romantic partnerships. The Divorce Party (2008) is a multi-generational story that examines both the beginning and the end of marriage and raises questions about the sustainability of romantic love across a lifetime. The First Husband (2011) also focuses on romantic love and features a female protagonist searching for meaning and self-actualization against the backdrop of a difficult breakup. Eight Hundred Grapes (2015) mirrors The Night We Lost Him’s focus on the impact of secrets on families and examines complex family dynamics through the eyes of a female narrator. Hello Sunshine (2018) also explores long-buried secrets and sibling relationships. The Last Thing He Told Me (2021), Dave’s best-known work, is a domestic thriller and was chosen as a Reese’s Bookclub pick and adapted into an AppleTV+ series starring Jennifer Garner.
Genre Context: Domestic Thrillers
Domestic thrillers are a subgenre of psychological thrillers. Like psychological thrillers, domestic thrillers use mystery and suspense to explore complex psychological issues and create feelings of anxiety and suspense. Domestic thrillers are additionally characterized by their specific focus on daily life, domestic settings, and fraught family relationships, and they often explore the impact that those situations have on individuals. The situations depicted in domestic thrillers, because they so closely parallel everyday life and represent relatively common experiences, create an especially familiar and often tense atmosphere. Their narratives are “closer to home” than espionage thrillers, police procedurals, or novels that focus on large-scale government intrigue, and as such, they are intended to be more relatable to the general reader.
Common themes include the impact of secrecy, lies, and deception on families, but they also explore issues such as work-life balance, infidelity, troubled marriages, the difficulties of parenting, and sibling rivalries. They often delve into darker topics such as intimate partner violence, the impact of childhood trauma, sexual abuse, and even murder. Domestic thrillers are typically character driven, featuring a finely drawn cast of figures who are dynamic, well developed, and round. Because they so frequently explore the nature of familial relationships, domestic thrillers offer a window into at least one character’s emotional state, motivations, and drives. The Night We Lost Him, although mostly narrated by Nora, includes flashbacks that showcase Liam’s point of view, broadening the scope of the narrative.
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a novel that uses an unreliable narrator to reveal the darker side of a seemingly perfect marriage, was one of the first texts to popularize domestic thrillers. Flynn’s other novels were also bestsellers and helped both to cement her reputation as an author and to establish the domestic thriller as an important subgenre. Freida McFadden is another prominent writer of domestic thrillers. Her novel The Housemaid, although an exploration of a domestic worker’s relationship with one family, portrays the impact of secrets on families like The Night We Lost Him. B. A. Paris’s Behind Closed Doors reveals the cracks in the façade of a “happy” marriage and, like The Night We Lost Him, alternates between past and present in order to better explain and explore its characters’ complex psychology. Sarah Pekkanen’s House of Glass also showcases fraught family dynamics and uses dramatic cliffhangers, unexpected plot twists, and foreshadowing in order to create an atmosphere of anxiety and suspense. Shari Lapena has also penned many best-selling domestic thrillers. Her novel Everyone Here Is Lying follows the disappearance of a young girl and shares an interest in grief and loss with The Night We Lost Him.
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