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 32-37Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 32 Summary
Silas finally calls Casey, apologizing for the delay. He’s been sick with a virus passed around on the field trip. They meet for dinner but neither eats much. Casey wants to tell Silas about Oscar. She decides that she wants “to know if it matters to him. It seems like the only way to find out his feelings for me” (265). She hesitates, and when they part without even a kiss at the T station, Casey still hasn’t told him but decides that Silas’s pat on the shoulder as a goodbye says enough.
Chapter 33 Summary
Casey’s first rejection letter arrives, but Muriel encourages her to keep her hopes up, confident that Casey’s book will sell. Casey is again starting to feel the crunch of need for money. Loan sharks have started calling her work to try to seize wages, and Adam wants to increase her rent. Ultimately Adam decides to sell half of his property and to evict Casey in three weeks.
Chapter 34 Summary
Casey makes her choice and stops calling Silas back. She decides that she’s “done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don’t know or can’t tell you what they want. I’m done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop” (Page 265). Casey goes to Oscar’s house for lunch with him and the boys. She has been reading Oscar’s books and tells him she loves his most recent novel Thunder Road, which pleases him. After lunch, while the boys are playing, Oscar tells Casey that he loves her.
Chapter 35 Summary
Casey tells Oscar about Adam selling the garage, and Oscar invites her to move in with him. The next Saturday, Oscar and his kids pick Casey up from her place to go apple picking. The boys are all stunned by how small her place is, and in the car John and Jasper also invite Casey to move into their house. At the apple orchard, the boys are insistent that Casey move in, and Oscar asks her privately how she feels about the invitation. He reminds her that she once moved to Spain for a man, Paco, but Casey responds that Paco didn’t have children. Casey wonders what would happen if their relationship doesn’t work out, but Oscar is adamant that it will.
Chapter 36 Summary
Casey’s life is changing quickly. The move out of her shed is coming on fast, and she has to make the enormous decision whether or not to move in with Oscar and his children. Then, Casey finds out that Thomas, the head chef she gets along with, is leaving and Clark the brunch chef will take over. Casey begins to get anxious at work, mixing up her orders and tables and feeling torn up and crazy. One Saturday night, Casey ends her shift and has a panic attack by her bicycle. She tries to settle herself in bed but has not been able to truly sleep in a long time. She tries to read but can’t get lost in the words, and she thinks about a life without reading or writing. Casey receives more rejection letters from the agents, so she’s starting to feel that it wouldn’t even matter.
The next morning, Casey goes for a long run. When she arrives back to her shed, there is a couple looking around the property. The woman says she wants to buy the lot to build a house on it, taking down the shed and starting from scratch. The conversation disturbs Casey, but she has to get ready to see Oscar and the boys. In the car, Jasper shows Casey a bloody scrape on his hand and John, who has the faint outline of a black eye, cries that Jasper started it. Casey tries to find out what happened, but Oscar asks her to quiet down. She escalates the boys’ emotions, and Oscar assures her that they’ll be fine in a bit. Casey doesn’t like this admonishment from Oscar but later the boys do stop. Jasper passes gas in the car, and Casey is disgusted by the smell. The boys laugh at her for not laughing.
Oscar, Casey, and the boys go miniature golfing. Casey had told herself that she would let Oscar win in front of his kids, but something about her mood of the day makes her dig her heels in. She wins easily, impressing everyone but also making the boys sad that their father didn’t win. Casey tries to calm herself down from the stress of the day in the car with the sad boys by clenching her muscles, a tactic she uses at work.
Casey tries to kill the last hour before work at a bookstore, where she comes across Darkness Invisible, a memoir of madness. Casey begins to read and cries because the first chapter feels intimately familiar and resonant with her own state of mind.
Casey has received eight rejection letters from agents. Each letter begins with a different sentence all essentially saying the same thing to Casey: Your book is not good enough to publish.
Chapter 37 Summary
Eleven rejection letters later, Casey receives a message from Jennifer Lin. Jennifer is the assistant of a well-known literary agent named Ellen Nelson. Jennifer tells Casey that Ellen isn’t taking on new clients but that she wants to represent Casey herself. She calls Casey by her real name, Camila, and says that she would be her first but only client. Ellen hops on the phone to assure Casey that Jennifer is a critical reader, so her passion for Casey’s novel Love and the Revolution must mean the book is something special. Jennifer gives Casey some feedback and asks for a revision in one month so she can try to sell it to editors before the holidays. Casey now has a literary agent.
Casey is late for her restaurant shift and realizes when she’s talking to Harry that she didn’t take down Jennifer’s notes for revision and she can’t remember anything except feedback about the party scene in chapter 5. Casey doesn’t want to call Jennifer back, so she calls Muriel with the disjointed parts she can remember. Muriel tries to help with feedback based on what Casey remembers, and Casey writes it down.
Chapters 32-37 Analysis
Casey’s life lacks stability. Changes that people with more security can handle in stride can completely shake up her world. The first major change Casey deals with is the pressures and uncertainty of her health. The lump on her armpit still hasn’t gone away, and Casey still needs to wait a few more weeks before she can get it analyzed. Meanwhile, Clark the brunch chef who is cruel to Casey becomes head chef when Thomas leaves. Now, each shift Casey works is a hotbed of anxiety. Most importantly, Adam tells her that he’s selling some of his property which means Casey needs to find a new place to live in three weeks. Because Casey doesn’t have the net to fall into it when things go wrong, these changes wreak havoc on her mental health. Her reaction to these challenges is indicative of the stalled nature of Casey’s adulthood. While many people experience adulthood with more money and more direction, Casey’s adulthood is more precarious. Her health, love life, financial situation, job, creative work, and even her home are threatened. Casey’s anxiety attacks are at best distracting and at worst crippling. She steadily loses her sense of self in these chapters, mired in her fears and the chaos of her life.
One other change that is significant is Casey’s decision to forget about Silas and choose Oscar. Casey’s failed date with Silas, in which he didn’t kiss her but patted her on the shoulder, was too disrespectful to Casey. She decides she needs to be finished forever with men like Silas who are flighty, unreliable, and too deep in their own problems to acknowledge hers. Immediately, Casey’s relationship with Oscar become infinitely more serious, as if Oscar somehow knew that she decided to be exclusive with him. He has her spend more time with him and his kids in their home, then he tells her he loves her. But with this new layer to their relationship comes the start of some problems, heightened by Casey’s intense anxiety and her inability or refusal to express these problems. After Casey wins the game of miniature golf and makes the kids sad that their dad didn’t, she spends the car ride clenching her muscles, her strategy for managing her anxiety and fending off her panic attacks. It’s a charged scene that invites the reader to wonder what Casey is truly upset about.
Oscar becomes more patronizing after he says he loves her, but his kindness and generosity maintain their relationship. When Casey tells him that she needs to move out of her place, he invites her to move in with him and his sons. This is an enormous decision for Casey that will dictate so much of her life. She’ll essentially be a stepmother, a younger live-in girlfriend, and a bit of a charity case all in one. Although Oscar seems to have only good intentions, his commitment to Casey is—ironically, given why she decided to give up on Silas—a little over the top, and his sons’ excitement that Casey would live with them is equally alarming. Their relationship progresses so quickly, and the dramatic irony here is that the reader knows what Oscar doesn’t: That for almost the entire time they were dating, Casey was also dating somebody else. So even though Casey chooses Oscar, her level of commitment to him is up for debate.
By chapter 37, it seems that Casey is on the rise again. She is seriously considering moving in with Oscar—again, less of a choice and more of a necessity—and she scores a literary agent. Jennifer Lin is a fast-talking, enthusiastic, critical, and empathetic reader of Casey’s novel. Casey is impressed by how deeply Jennifer seems to have understood Love and the Revolution, and Jennifer is a fitting agent in that neither she nor Casey have much experience, but they both have passion. Casey doesn’t get approached by Jennifer until after 11 other rejections. Just when she was starting to lose hope, King introduces readers to Jennifer. Jennifer symbolizes the importance of not giving up on your dreams and of believing in yourself before other people can believe in you. Also notably symbolic in this chapter is when Jennifer calls Casey by her first name Camila, the first time the reader learns what her real name is. Casey derived her name from a passion of her father’s, a man whom she has largely tried to forget about. Her real name Camila is more indicative of her mother’s Cuban culture. Perhaps, King suggests, Casey wants to start a new chapter of her life in which is not her father’s daughter Casey; she is her mother’s daughter Camila.
