Margot Covey

Margot Covey, the eldest of the Covey sisters, is both a point of reference and a source of practical counsel as her family moves through grief, separation, and change. Having gone away to school in a different country, she understands the pull of home and the particular questions of belonging that can emerge at college. Her support for Lara Jean is generous but not merely reassuring: she encourages independence, cultural connection, and the preservation of family bonds, while her own return makes the changes in the household newly visible.

Identity and Perspective

Margot’s experience of living and studying outside the family home shapes the advice she gives her younger sister. She tells Lara Jean to make friends of her own rather than relying on Peter’s social life, which will grow through lacrosse, and to find people who feel like her own. Her recommendation is specific: join an Asian-American group. Margot says that, because she went to school in a different country, she feels she missed out on that kind of community, and describes college as a time when students encounter questions of racial identity. Her counsel links independence not with detachment from identity, but with finding a community in which that identity can be explored.

She also encourages Lara Jean to imagine a future in William and Mary’s surroundings with curiosity. The Cheese Shop, with its specialty food and roast beef sandwiches, is one of the pleasures she points out; the Williamsburg outlet mall and its freshly popped kettle corn offer another. When Lara Jean jokingly imagines working in Colonial Williamsburg, churning butter in period dress, she wonders whether historical accuracy would keep Asian people from being hired. Margot counters that Phillipa Soo, who is half-Chinese, played Eliza Hamilton, and insists that Lara Jean could do the job too. If the attraction refused to hire her, Margot says, they could make the issue public on social media. Her encouragement recognizes the racial question rather than asking Lara Jean to ignore it, while still pushing her to picture herself in the opportunity.

Care, Grief, and Remembrance

Margot’s closeness to her sisters is most visible when Lara Jean loses Stormy. Unable to travel to the funeral in Rhode Island, Lara Jean calls Margot the morning after hearing the news. They cry together, and Margot proposes a memorial at Belleview so the people who cannot attend the funeral can share memories. The suggestion gives Lara Jean a way to act on grief rather than leaving Stormy’s friends without a gathering of their own. Margot wishes she could attend, but her idea helps shape the service Lara Jean will lead.

That care has an earlier history in the sisters’ shared bereavement. Lara Jean remembers the day their mother died: she was nine, Margot eleven, and Kitty only two. Their father cried silently beside Lara Jean while holding Kitty, who kept asking him not to cry. The memory is carried most strongly through physical closeness and the children’s helplessness; Lara Jean recalls feeling that nothing was safe anymore. Margot’s later role in responding to Stormy’s death therefore sits within a family history in which loss has already altered the sisters’ sense of security. Her call offers companionship without claiming to undo grief.

Margot also helps preserve the stories of people who might otherwise be lost to time. Stormy had wanted Lara Jean to transcribe her memoirs under the title Stormy Weather, but they never completed the project. After Stormy’s death, Lara Jean asks how people will know her story. At the Belleview memorial, Lara Jean answers that concern by telling one vivid episode from Stormy’s youth: in 1952, at eighteen, Stormy went skinny-dipping in a town lake on a dare, and made the responding police turn away before she would come out. The residents recognize the story’s pattern—Stormy could never turn down a dare—and their laughter turns a private recollection into shared testimony. Lara Jean then describes Stormy as a force of nature who taught her that love means making brave choices every day, and concludes that Stormy always chose love and adventure as one and the same. Margot is not at the service, but the memorial exists because she recognized the need for such collective remembrance.

Sisters and Family Change

Margot’s homecoming after Trina moves into the Covey house exposes how much the household has changed. Dan picks her up from the airport, and when she enters with her suitcases she surveys the living room. Trina’s abstract shoreline painting now hangs on the mantel; embroidered pillows, a framed photograph of Trina and Dan on the day he proposed, an armchair brought in to replace the old one, and numerous small ornaments have also altered the room. Lara Jean has already moved her parents’ wedding portrait into her own room. Margot does not announce what she is thinking, but her eyes move over the differences, and Lara Jean recognizes that she is silently taking them in. Seeing the room through Margot’s eyes, Lara Jean concedes that it looks cluttered.

The changes are tangible in the shoe closet as well. Margot finds it packed with Trina’s shoes and has to shove Trina’s cycling shoes aside to make room for her own booties. The moment is ordinary, but it condenses the practical question of a family expanding: Margot is still coming home, yet the shared space no longer belongs to the old household alone. Her close observation makes her return a measure of what has changed, without reducing her to an opponent of Trina’s presence.

The sisters also negotiate what it means for the new family arrangement to include their Korean heritage. When Kitty and Peter suggest incorporating a wedding custom they associate with Asian culture, Kitty clarifies that it is Thai rather than Korean. Margot objects that Trina is not Asian and should not be expected to appropriate Asian culture simply because the Covey sisters are. Lara Jean replies that Trina wants them to feel included and has suggested acknowledging their mother. Margot points out that Trina never knew their mother, a reminder that good intentions do not erase the difference between joining a family and sharing its history. Margot’s insistence that culture not be treated as a decorative gesture is distinct from Lara Jean’s more conciliatory interpretation of Trina’s effort.

Her concern becomes still more explicit when Kitty asks whether Trina’s dislike of Korean food means the family will stop eating it. Margot calls Korean food the sisters’ biggest link to Korean culture and says that marrying Dan means Trina joins the whole package, Korea included. Lara Jean reassures her that Trina knows this, adding that the sisters will eat Korean food every day during their summer trip. The exchange shows Margot defending cultural continuity within a changing household, while the planned trip gives the sisters a concrete way to sustain that connection together.

Advice, Intimacy, and Growing Up

Margot’s advice reaches beyond school and family into Lara Jean’s approach to adult intimacy. As Lara Jean packs for Beach Week, she denies that she plans to have sex, but Margot tells her to take her kit in case circumstances change. She is teasing at first, then speaks seriously about her own first time with Josh: she is glad it was with someone who knew her and loved her. Margot does not turn that experience into a command about what Lara Jean must do. Instead, she offers a standard grounded in being known and cared for, while leaving the decision with her sister. Lara Jean later packs condoms deep in her suitcase and adds a special set of underwear, both framed as precautions for a possibility rather than a settled plan.

That mix of candor and respect echoes Margot’s college advice. She wants Lara Jean to form her own friendships, seek an Asian-American community, and remain open to the opportunities around her; she also speaks plainly about sex without claiming authority over Lara Jean’s choices. In both contexts, Margot’s care takes the form of preparation. She cannot decide what her sister’s future will be, but she can make sure Lara Jean has language, practical options, and a sense that she need not enter new experiences alone.

Narrative Role and Significance

Margot connects several forms of transition: the move from home to college, the gradual reshaping of a family after bereavement, and the effort to carry cultural and personal memory into new circumstances. Her perspective abroad gives her a reason to urge Lara Jean toward Asian-American community, while her return to the house shows that belonging is also negotiated through shared rooms, crowded closets, and newly introduced family objects. Neither independence nor continuity is effortless: the sisters can welcome change and still notice what has been displaced.

Her role in Stormy’s remembrance similarly joins practical action to emotional inheritance. Margot cannot attend the funeral, and she is absent from the Belleview service, but she gives Lara Jean the idea that turns loss into a gathering where stories can be told. Across these moments, Margot’s support is neither a simple assurance that everything will be fine nor a demand that the family remain unchanged. She helps her sisters make room for new lives while insisting that their histories, relationships, and cultural ties remain part of what that room contains.