Sara Barnum

Sara Barnum is Shelby Anderson Barnum’s mother and one of the most important absent figures in the novel. Her life is reconstructed through a childhood flashback and through Shelby’s later testimony, while her death remains an active emotional force rather than a closed piece of backstory. Sara represents the warmth and security Shelby once possessed, but her loss also marks the beginning of a grief that continues to shape Shelby’s body, relationships, fears, and eventual recovery.

Identity and Family Presence

Sara is introduced as part of a close family scene with Shelby and Connor Barnum at Santa Monica State Beach in Los Angeles. When six-year-old Shelby falls headfirst onto the sand, Sara immediately runs to her, takes her into her arms, checks that she is unharmed, and relaxes only after seeing the child’s innocent smile. The moment establishes her as attentive and physically protective, a mother whose first response to danger is care.

Sara and Connor are shown standing together with Shelby while looking toward a house abandoned for years. Connor encircles Sara’s waist, and both adults contemplate the neglected building as their imagined ideal home. Sara explains that a dream home is the kind of house a person would one day like to have, giving the child a first vocabulary for aspiration, family, and permanence. Shelby responds by promising that she will become rich and buy the house for her parents when she grows up. Connor and Sara laugh, and the scene returns to ordinary tenderness as Shelby runs across the sand under their affectionate gaze.

Illness, Death, and Shelby’s Grief

Sara’s importance becomes sharper when Shelby revisits the memories she most wishes to recover. During therapy, Shelby says that she wants to find herself again in her mother’s arms and describes Sara as an extraordinary source of light. She remembers her as a woman who seemed to illuminate every place she entered, who smiled constantly, and whose voice was angelic and calming. These memories are not merely sentimental details: they identify Sara as Shelby’s internal image of emotional safety.

That brightness is placed against the ordeal of Sara’s illness. Shelby recalls that Sara suffered from generalized cancer and that witnessing her deterioration was the first major trial she endured with Connor. Shelby was only eight years old, yet she remained beside her mother and tried to be her own source of sunlight. The child’s attempt to comfort the dying parent reverses the expected direction of care: Sara had protected Shelby, but illness forced Shelby to confront helplessness while trying to protect Sara emotionally.

Sara eventually died, leaving Shelby with a loss that cannot be reduced to a single moment of bereavement. Shelby’s memories of her mother bring genuine happiness, but they coexist with other memories she would rather remove. The novel therefore presents Sara’s death as both a cherished memory and a wound that returns through delayed distress. Shelby’s later self-harm, eating disorder, cannabis use, anxiety, and panic are discussed as consequences of the wider traumatic event in her life, while Sara’s death remains one of the foundational losses against which Shelby measures safety and abandonment.

Memory, Panic, and the Need for Safe Witnessing

Shelby’s relationship to the past is marked by a movement between silence and disclosure. In therapy, Sunmi Eun recognizes that Shelby has difficulty integrating into her surroundings and opening herself to other people after a significant event. Shelby initially refuses to discuss it immediately, and Sunmi responds by giving her time and assuring her that what she says will remain confidential. This therapeutic patience creates the conditions in which Sara can later be remembered not only as a dead mother but as a living emotional presence in Shelby’s narrative.

The novel repeatedly shows how unprocessed memory becomes bodily experience. During an art-class panic attack, Shelby’s pain, racing heart, constricted chest, accelerating breath, tears, and desperate attempt to cover her ears overwhelm her before she can explain what is happening. Cassiopée Smith approaches her, but Shelby recoils from touch and remains curled up in distress. Later, when Madison Jefferson encounters another attack, Shelby pushes her away and begs not to be touched or harmed. These scenes clarify why Sara’s remembered embrace matters so much: physical contact is simultaneously associated with terror and with the lost safety Shelby once knew in her mother’s arms.

Shelby’s recovery is therefore not presented as simple replacement. Sunmi’s support, Cassiopée’s calm attempt to stay near her, and Jungkook Jeon’s decision to remain beside her without immediately knowing how to help all provide forms of witnessing that do not erase Sara. Jungkook’s later assurance that he believes Shelby gives her relief, but the narrative does not make that reassurance equivalent to maternal restoration. Instead, it shows Shelby gradually receiving new forms of trustworthy presence while still carrying the memory of the person who first embodied protection.

The Cemetery Visit and Continuing Influence

Sara becomes physically present in the narrative through Shelby’s visit to the cemetery. Shelby buys a bouquet of white tulips and goes to her mother’s grave with Jungkook. He initially steps away so that Shelby can grieve privately, then returns when she signals him to sit beside her. Shelby rests her head on his left shoulder while looking at the gravestone bearing Sara Anderson’s name and the years of her birth and death. The visit gives grief a place, an object, and a ritual form after a long period in which Shelby has been unable to pay her respects.

While Jungkook is briefly away, Shelby speaks inwardly about everything that has happened since she last came to the grave, as though writing in a private diary. She includes Jungkook in that account and acknowledges how well she feels with him. Her imagined address to Sara links mourning with renewed attachment: Shelby does not abandon her mother by continuing to live, and she does not abandon her present relationship by remembering the dead. Jungkook then addresses Sara directly, calling Shelby wonderful and remarkable and promising to remain at her side. The promise functions as a symbolic act of respect toward the mother whose absence still structures Shelby’s emotional life.

Sara’s memory also stands behind Shelby’s insistence that her love belongs to Jungkook. When Jungkook becomes jealous after seeing another man take Shelby’s hand and hearing other men speak about her perversely, Shelby reassures him that she loves only him and that this will never change. Her response belongs to her present relationship, yet it also continues the novel’s larger pattern of defining trustworthy intimacy against experiences of violation, fear, and loss. The security Sara once represented becomes a standard by which Shelby recognizes whether another relationship allows her to remain herself.

Narrative Significance and Legacy

Sara Barnum’s narrative role is not to drive present-day action but to give Shelby’s psychological history a human center. The childhood scene at Santa Monica State Beach presents an intact world of parental affection, shared dreams, and bodily freedom. The later recollection of cancer and death fractures that world, while the adult scenes of panic reveal how the consequences persist long after the original loss. Through this structure, Sara is remembered in fragments of touch, light, voice, illness, and place rather than through a continuous biography.

Her legacy is ultimately connected to the novel’s idea of rebirth. The closing reflection defines renewal as allowing an earlier self to die so that a new one can emerge, leaving the past behind while accepting that the process may take months or years. Shelby and Jungkook are said to advance together and in their own ways, leaving their demons behind through an ordeal that is difficult but not impossible. Sara’s death cannot be undone, and the text does not suggest that recovery requires forgetting her. Instead, Shelby’s movement forward depends on learning to carry grief without allowing it to determine every future attachment. Sara remains the lost source of light within that process, while her daughter’s renewed will to live becomes the clearest continuation of the love she once gave.