The Lovely Bones

“I hadn’t yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn’t believe it, would not believe it.”

At first, the only family member that Susie misses while in heaven is the family dog Holiday. She has not yet accepted her death and tries to deny her reality by not missing her family. This sets up the main emotional arc of the novel—both Susie’s family on earth, as well as Susie herself, need to accept and grieve Susie’s death before they can move on with their lives.

“There was only one picture in which my mother was Abigail. It was that first one, the one taken of her unawares, the one captured before the click startled her into the mother of the birthday girl, owner of the happy dog, wife to the loving man, and mother again to another girl and a cherished boy. Homemaker. Gardener. Sunny neighbor. My mother’s eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss.”

Throughout the novel, Abigail struggles with reconciling the different facets of her identity. She feels that her marriage and the birth of her three children have crushed her dreams of moving to Paris or becoming a teacher. This picture is the first time Susie sees Abigail as a complete person, rather than just her mother. While Susie hides this photo for herself, Lindsey, Lynn, and Jack later see it, and the image helps them come to similar realizations about Abigail.

“Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.”

Here we see the shifts in family relationships that occur after Susie’s death. Jack takes the death the hardest, and Lindsey and Buckley begin treating Jack as a child because of his emotional fragility. However, this is not seen as regressive or pathetic, but as a beautiful expression of familial love.

“I’m not saying I didn’t resent it, that it didn’t remind me of sitting at the dinner table and having to listen to Lindsey tell my parents about the test she’d done so well on, or about how the history teacher was going to recommend her for the district honors council, but Lindsey was living, and the living deserved attention too.”

This passage demonstrates Jack’s struggle over how to distribute his love amongst his children. While he knows he should save his love for the living, he cannot help but fixate on his deceased daughter. This also ties in with Susie’s sibling rivalry with Lindsey. Although Susie is the eldest child, she is average compared to the intellectually and athletically gifted Lindsey. Much like her resentment towards Lindsey’s achievements being celebrated at the dinner table, Susie admits to being somewhat covetous of Jack’s love even after her death. Throughout the novel, Susie will come to accept her death and be happy for Lindsey’s successes in life.

“I forgot my father in the family room and my mother counting silver. I saw Lindsey move towards Samuel Heckler. She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again.”

This passage highlights a recurring element of the novel: While Susie continues to covet the coming-of-age experiences that her death denies her, she vicariously experiences them through Lindsey. These moments allow Susie some measure of happiness and help her accept her death.

“That week Ray would kiss me by my locker. It didn’t happen up on the scaffold when he’d wanted it to. Our only kiss was like an accident—a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”

This quote emphasizes that life is unpredictable and rarely unfolds the way we would wish. Instead of a “perfect” first kiss in the scaffolding (i.e. a real rainbow), Susie and Ray share an “accidental” first kiss (beautiful in its own way, but not perfect). Throughout the novel, the characters must accept that insisting on perfection is folly and one must accept the unpredictability of life, both good and bad.

“I grew to love Ruth on those mornings, feeling that in some way we could never explain on our opposite sides of the Inbetween, we were born to keep each other company. Odd girls who had found each other in the strangest way—in the shiver she had felt when I passed.”

This passage emphasizes the shared connection between Susie and Ruth based on their mutual outsider status. Ruth is a social outcast whose classmates consider her weird and strange, and Susie is a literal outsider to life. Although they only meet once in life, Ruth becomes Susie’s closest connection on earth due to their spiritual link, which helps both of them move on and grow. This emphasizes the unpredictability of life and how we may form unexpected and unconventional connections with one another.

“Even if it felt false, elevating his mood for my brother was often the favorite part of his day.” 

Buckley provides a crucial anchoring role to his family, particularly Jack. Although the family struggles to tell Buckley about Susie’s death (and Buckley himself does not quite understand it yet), Jack is able to make himself happy by pretending to be happy for Buckley. 

“He had seen them that serious only one other time. But whereas in the hospital, their eyes had been worried and then later not, shot through with so much light and relief that they’d enveloped him, now our parents’ eyes had gone flat and not returned.”

This shows Buckley’s struggle to understand death at his young age. His only previous experience with an event that had such a traumatic impact on his family was his near-death choking experience. In that instance, Susie saved Buckley, and he was able to see how happy his family became when he awoke during his hospitalization. However, he only sees the weight on his parents that won’t ever lift because Susie can’t come back. 

“When I was alive, everything my grandmother did was bad. But an odd thing happened when she arrived in her rented limo that day, opened up our house, and barged in. She was, in all her obnoxious finery, dragging the light back in.”

The introduction of Grandma Lynn stands as a stark contrast to the melancholic atmosphere that has permeated the Salmon household up until this point. Although she has many faults, and Abigail previously cut her out of the family, Grandma Lynn becomes a saving grace and causes the Salmons to smile for the first time since Susie’s disappearance.

“He hadn’t woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst thing. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal—whatever normal was.”

This quote emphasizes the necessity of grieving and accepting one’s emotions after a traumatic event as part of the healing process. Jack finds the memorial service pleasant because it allows him to admit to other people how much Susie’s absence affects him, and he does not have to pretend to be back to normal. The novel emphasizes processing one’s grief to move on from it, rather than engaging in denial or other maladaptive behaviors.

“Samuel and I saw the tremor. The inside shakeoff of her heart. She was getting so good the cracks and fissures were smaller and smaller. Soon, like a sleight-of-hand trick perfected, no one would see her do it. She could shut out the whole world, including herself.”

This is one of Lindsey’s lowest moments; her response to Susie’s death and the subsequent “walking dead syndrome” she experiences is to emotionally disassociate. Although this reaction is unhealthy, Lindsey’s relationship with Samuel helps her continue living. She eventually comes to terms with Susie’s death and is able to remember Susie without orienting her life around her sister’s absence.

“At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.”

This quote contrasts the starkly different experiences of sex by the two Salmon sisters. Susie’s experience of losing her virginity comes during her rape, so dominance and violence color her understanding of sex and sexuality. Lindsey, on the other hand, loses her virginity to her true love, Samuel, and her experience with sex is tender and loving. 

“First he shut off the porch light they kept on all night for me and that, even though it had been eight months since the police said I would not be found alive, they could not bring themselves to stop leaving on.”

The light is a commonly used symbol in the novel of hope and love: Lynn brings the light back in to the Salmon household, and in the previous quote, Lindsey’s loss of virginity is said to have “windows” on the walls of her sex. Here, we see how the Salmons left their porch light on every night since Susie’s disappearance, unable to accept that Susie is not coming home. However, Jack shuts off the light not because he has properly accepted Susie’s death and moved on, but because he is planning to go murder Harvey. His plan backfires, symbolizing the futility of seeking revenge.

“For a time leaden weights had been tied by anesthesia to the four corners of his consciousness. Like a firm waxen cover it had locked him away tight into the hard-blessed hours where there was no dead daughter and no gone knee, and where there was also no sweet daughter whispering rhymes.” 

When Jack is hospitalized after being beaten in the cornfield, he is anesthetized. This is the first time that he can rest comfortably without thinking of Susie. This shows how strong of an impact Susie’s death has had on Jack and how much help he needs in moving past it.

“When I look back now I see that my mother had become—and very quickly after they moved into that house—lonely. Because I was the oldest, I became her closest friend.”

It is only after her death that Susie is finally able to understand her mother better. She realizes how her mother gave up on her dreams after getting married and having children, and how she struggled to reconcile the various facets of her personality. This also represents the oppressive gender roles of 1970s suburbia. Because Abigail can only be a stay-at-home mother, she has no outlets for the other aspects of her personality. In this isolation, her child becomes her sole friend.

“Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”

Susie meets with Harvey’s other victims in heaven, and they share their stores. This is a necessary healing moment—every time Susie tells her story, she feels less pain and less alone, and it helps her come to terms with what happened. Although talk alone does not change things, the novel argues that simply talking with people who have shared similar tragic experiences is a crucial part of the healing process. This helps Susie come to terms with her death and eventually move on.

“He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.”

A crucial formative moment in George Harvey’s life comes when three drunk men accost him and his mother. Harvey’s mother orders Harvey to run one of the men over, and this experience causes him to realize how oppressed, marginalized, and powerless women and children are in the world. Yet this realization does not spur him to make the world a better place by fighting these injustices. Instead, he uses this observation to prey on the weak by targeting young women.

“How could they both work to support their families and watch their children to make sure they were safe? As a group they would learn it was impossible, no matter how many rules they laid down What had happened to me could happen to anyone.”

Susie’s every-child quality emphasizes that tragedy can strike despite our best efforts. Although everyone believed that child abduction and murder didn’t happen in the suburbs, Susie’s death forces the other families to recognize their own powerlessness in protecting their children from harm. The novel argues that attempting to protect people and things from all harm is counterproductive as it forecloses the possibility of growth. The imagery of the snow globes and the ships in bottles supports the futility of closing one’s self off.

“I watched my beautiful sister running, her lungs and legs pumping, and the skills from the pool still there—fighting to see through the rain, fighting to keep her legs lifting at the pace set by Samuel, and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing—braiding into a scar for eight long years.”

This quote signifies the moment when Lindsey moves on from Susie’s death. Lindsey chooses to live her life neither oriented towards nor away from Susie’s memory. Although she will always remember her sister—much like how a scar never truly goes away—Lindsey decides to continue forward in her life while keeping the memories of Susie in her heart. Lindsey’s own acceptance helps Susie to move on in heaven now that she knows her family has finally come to terms with her death.

“He kissed me lightly again, on the lips. What I had wanted for so long. The moment slowed down, and I drank it in. The brush of his lips, the slight stubble of his beard as it grazed me, and the sound of the kiss—the small smack of suction as our lips parted after the pushing together and then the more brutal breaking away.”

Susie briefly switches bodies with Ruth and has sex with Ray, which is the one act she has desired most in heaven. The language here emphasizes the very human bodily contact—the feelings, the sounds, the smells, and the sights. Susie enjoys the sensation of having a body again and similarly enjoys the human connection.

“I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.”

Susie finally comes to terms with her death and accepts her absence from the world. Seeing how her family has healed and moved on, she no longer needs them to yearn for her. The novel reminds us that the Salmons will never forgot Susie because they will always love her, and she will always love them. But just as children must come-of-age and move on from their family, Susie needs to now move on from seeking her answers on earth. In doing so, she is finally able to ascend to true Heaven and find peace.

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost; but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

This quote states the thesis of the novel by invoking its title. Although Susie’s death was a horrific tragedy, her friends and family were able to build stronger connections with each other through their grieving of Susie. She describes the family and friends who have come together as a body that has grown around her “lovely bones,” much as a child’s body grows into an adult. Similar to how dead living matter nourishes the growth of other living material, the novel emphasizes these cycles of destruction and reconstruction, with Susie’s re-constituted extended family growing stronger than ever.