Analysis of Anna Quindlen's One True Thing: This novel is not so much the story of a child’s effort to understand their parents, as it is homage to the underestimated role of mother and wife. Do you agree?
...pay much attention to what went into her… My father was desert…I may have inherited my predilection to judge harshly from him as well.” Then, as the novel progressed George was transformed. “My father had been like a boy in that picture in the two weeks after my mother died: diminished, overshadowed, frozen in some posture out of his customary place in the world.” And Kate was so aptly described as the centre of their family, if the family had been a wheel, Kate would have been the “hub and the route all at once… we were directionless”. Therefore Ellen did in fact seek both of her parents, and she discovered new parts to both of them. What sprung from Ellen’s findings for the identity of both her parents was her search for her own identity. The changes in her identity would not have been so large if she had not become detached from her father. In discovering what repulsed her about her father, she was then able to move away from that and subtract some of the values that he had instilled in her out of her life, as well as insert some things she learnt from Kate. Evidence of this transition is when Ellen and Mrs. Forburg recapitulate. “My father is not dead. He’s in my head all the time. He’s a running commentary, that voice of his, like subtitles.” “And your mother?’ “Her too, but no commentary. Just a presence. Like God. There’s not a whole lot of room for me in there” “Oh honey… that is you.” This states directly that Ellen’s reassessment of her own identity originates from the discoveries she made concerning her parents. Ellen’s views of the roles of mother and wife are only weakly simultaneous to her discoveries of both her parents. This established that the novel is not homage to the underestimated role of mother and wife. Although most of the novel was focused on Kate’s illness and it’s affect on the Gulden family, this does not necessarily mean that the other character’s roles were...