58 pages • 1 hour read
Lily KingWriters and Lovers
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
On a walk with Adam’s dog, Casey is deep in thought about her work and walks right into an oncoming car. Although she is not seriously hurt, the incident reminds her that she can’t go to the hospital because she has no health insurance and it would be too expensive. Later, Liz and Pat Doyle come back to Iris and try to connect Casey with a writing job with health insurance, an idea she is more interested in after the accident. Casey borrows professional clothes from Muriel and meets Lynn, the head of an organization called “Families in Need.” Casey is asked to write a thank you letter to a couple who donated a refrigerator, but after 45 minutes and eight drafts written with a confusing typewriter, Casey flees the office. Despite how demeaning her work as a server can be, Casey thinks, “I never have to go back to that office on Boylston Street again and sit in uncomfortable clothes and type in a windowless room”(175). Casey asks her manager Marcus about health insurance, which turns out to be quite affordable. Three days later, Casey finally writes the final sentence of her book.
Chapter 15 Summary
That Sunday at Iris, brunch is crazier than usual. Casey has a bad history with the brunch chef Clark. He was kind to Casey until one morning when he came on to her, soliciting oral sex in the walk-in. Casey complained to Marcus, but he brushed her off, and she heard him and Clark laughing about it later. Since that day, Clark is especially cruel to Casey. Amid the chaos, a little boy approaches Casey and asks to pay ahead of time for his father’s birthday brunch, a cute request that Casey plays along with. When Casey goes to the boy’s table to take the order, she finds a second boy and Oscar Kolton. Casey is nervous because waiting on writers makes her blush and babble. Casey hears from one of the other servers that the boys and Oscar used to come in all the time for Mother’s Day, and Casey notices how the boys “watch my hands in silence. Even in the chaos and clatter of brunch, I’m aware of the empty chair, the hole where a mother should be” (148).
When Oscar asks for the bill, Casey says it’s already been taken care of and avoids him by focusing busily on her other tables. Oscar speaks to Marcus and leaves four twenties for Casey. Oscar also asks Marcus to pass along an envelope with a note to Casey. In the note, Oscar invites Casey to play mini golf with him and his two sons, Jasper and John. Casey is flattered that an author of three novels would labor over a small note for her. Even though Casey vowed never to golf again, she believes she could enjoy it with Oscar, John, and Jasper.
Chapter 16 Summary
Casey’s father involved her in golf at a young age. His commitment to her being the best informed her childhood and built tension between her parents. Caleb was sent away to boarding school in Virginia as a child, and without that second child’s needs, Casey’s father put his focus solely on her golfing career.
Casey and her father come back from her win in Florida at the Palm Beach Junior Invitational to discover her mother gone, away to Phoenix with Javier. It was Casey’s ninth grade year at the same high school where her father worked as a math teacher and sports coach. He poured even more attention into Casey’s golf, and by sophomore year she received a future full ride to Duke University. He also began having some of the high school boys on his team over at night for beers and to watch sports. Soon, even his office at school wasn’t solitary enough for Casey.
One day, Casey went down to her father’s school office to lay down on his couch. The room was dark and empty, but soon Casey could hear voices. The office was right next to the girls’ locker room. While Casey lies down, Casey’s father and three high school boys leave the storage closet in the office, unaware of Casey. She slips in the closet and discovers drilled holes that give a perfect view into the girls’ locker room. Casey shows the athletic director the holes, and her father announces an early retirement. When Casey mother returns, she decides to never spend another night at her father’s place. She stops playing in tournaments and loses her golf scholarship but not her enrollment at Duke. She waits tables and takes out student loans her first year of college, too disgusted to complicate her life again with golfing, even if it means financial stability.
Chapter 17 Summary
Casey receives her health insurance card and is able to go to the doctor for the first time in five years. The dermatologist removes three moles for biopsy, she gets a pap smear from the gynecologist, and she receives a check-up with a general physician.
At work, Casey receives two phone calls. She misses the one from Oscar but receives the dermatologist’s call about her biopsy. Two of the moles are precancerous and the third is squamous cell carcinoma.
The next day, Casey decides to call Oscar, whose phone number was legible but crossed out on his note. Before she can call him, she gets another phone call at work, this time from the gynecologist who tells her that she has severe dysplasia on her cervix. She runs out of time to call Oscar, but when she gets home Oscar calls her. He asks her out on a date for a walk in the arboretum and tells her that he’s 45 years old. They decide to go out without his kids.
Chapter 18 Summary
Casey and Oscar, who brings his dog Bob, meet in front of the arboretum. He confesses that he’s scared of trees after an accident from his childhood when an owl jumped out of the hole of a tree and pecked his forehead. As they walk, Casey tells him that she’s seen him before at his book party with Muriel. Oscar is displeased that Casey is a writer, adding that he doesn’t date writers but that she’s also the first woman in a long time that he’s interested in. Casey has only ever dated writers but assures him that even though she knew who he was when they met at the restaurant, it was his affectionate kids who sparked her interest in him. Oscar tells Casey about his wife’s death from cancer, and Casey tells him about her mother. He confides “that one of the hardest things has been his boys at ages two and five having to go through something he hasn’t” (233).
Chapter 19 Summary
There is a message from Silas on Casey’s voicemail machine. She plays it twice, pauses over his little laugh, then hits erase.
Chapters 14-19 Analysis
Yet another layer to Casey’s grief is the reality that her father is the only parent she has left. Her relationship with her father has always been complicated and formative, starting at age three when he forced her into golf. Casey will later intuit through her mother that Casey never really had much of an interest in golf, even though it informed much of her childhood. Casey was ranked in the national top three for her golf game, a manifestation of her father’s own failed dreams. This helps King emphasize Casey’s drive for an independent life, even at the cost of her financial security. Because she spent so much of her time living out someone else’s goals, Casey now lives only for herself. This is a conscious choice inspired by watching her parents. When Casey discovers that her father watches teenage girls and apparently masturbates to them, something within Casey shuts off. She never lives with her father again when her mother gets back, gets him fired, and quits golf even though she has a scholarship to Duke. The extremity of this year in Casey’s life—her mother leaving, the discovery of her father as a sexual predator—still haunts Casey and inspires her to stay fiercely on her own and true to her own life.
This sense of self is also developed through her mother’s actions. Even though it seems more predictable that Casey would harbor resentments toward her mother for leaving her with her father and his girlfriend while her mom pursued a tragic love affair in another state, it seems instead that Casey almost admires her mother for leaving. Although she couldn’t understand her mother’s feelings at the time, as an adult Casey views her mother’s abandonment as a seizure of her mother’s own liberty and joy. Casey’s unconventional mother also relates to Casey’s own unconventional life as waitress and writer. When Casey has the opportunity to have a better-paying, more secure job in an office, she panics her way through it. This is an important subplot because King shows that Casey’s sometimes chaotic and stressful life is a choice and a commitment to a certain way of life. Just as her mother lived for the moment, so too does Casey live for the morning, and not for the dollar. This implication is important, because it helps the reader see beyond Casey’s interpretation of herself. Because this book is told in first-person and in almost a stream-of-consciousness narrative, it’s easy for the reader to get carried away by Casey’s sadness. Now the reader is able to glance at Casey’s life as an empathetic but critical observer to see that Casey may really love her life, no matter how difficult it may seem.
Although both of her parents were formative in how Casey built her life, it should also be noted that Casey had not one but two parents who disappointed her. Her mother left, and her father touched himself when he spied on his teenage students. Furthermore, Caleb was sent away to boarding school at a young age to “make a man out of him.” The foundation of Casey’s family was faulty, leading to insecurity and loneliness. It is no wonder then that Casey, as an adult, continues to live her life with a veil of loneliness. This family history also helps King give more layers to Casey’s relationships with men. Casey tends to find herself in fleeting but passionate relationships that burn out quickly and leave her feeling even lonelier. King asks the reader to consider whether or not Casey is able to maintain a healthy relationship without a model, or whether she will continuously fall into a self-sabotaging cycle with men.
At this point in the novel at least, Casey does continuously repeat patterns. She only dates men who are writers, and in these chapters Casey again begins a relationship with yet another writer. Another pattern is that Casey seeks out people who intimately understand grief and loss: Luke lost his daughter, Silas his sister, and Oscar his wife. On the one hand, King implies through Casey’s constant sadness that these patterns only serve to prolong Casey’s problems and prohibit her growth. However, there is something different about Casey’s burgeoning relationship with Oscar. Oscar, unlike the men Casey usually dates, is a majorly successful author and a person with adult responsibilities, structure, and security. Oscar symbolizes the kind of life Casey would want, and it’s easy for her to feel flattered by Oscar’s attention. There is also an escapist quality to her phone tag with Oscar. The reader goes through Casey’s experiences of life with her, yet she seems not to allow herself to dwell on the very serious health concerns that come out of her finally going to the doctor. Instead of focusing any attention on these phone calls, King instead has Casey—and by extension the reader—ignore these issues but worry about them in the background.
