Gillian

Gillian is Frances’s deceased friend, encountered in a vivid vision that gives their friendship a continuing presence after death. In the vision, Gillian shares a fantastical sleigh ride with Frances beneath a star-studded sky; later, she offers Frances a quiet account of beauty as something always present, accessible through stillness. Their conversation is marked by affection, teasing familiarity, and Frances’s persistent pull back toward ordinary concerns. Afterward, Frances tells Zoe that the encounter felt more vivid than a dream and more real than waking life, but when Zoe asks whether they truly saw the dead, Frances answers uncertainly. Gillian therefore matters both as a remembered friend and as the centre of an experience whose meaning the novel does not settle.

Identity and Place in Frances’s Life

Gillian is identified as Frances’s friend and as someone who died the previous year. Her importance is shown less through biographical detail than through the ease and history of their exchanges: Frances speaks to her directly, remembers the circumstances of an old kiss, and misses her openly. In the vision, Gillian is not presented as a distant or solemn figure. She participates in the same comic, conversational world as Frances, even while speaking from a condition Frances understands as death.

That intimacy is especially evident when Henry recalls that Gillian kissed him at someone’s thirtieth birthday party. Frances dismisses the incident by saying Gillian was drunk, and Gillian agrees, adding that she felt bad about it until the day she died. The exchange gives their friendship a shared past and a private candour that survives the vision’s extraordinary setting. Gillian can acknowledge embarrassment without ceremony, while Frances responds with the blunt familiarity of someone who knew her well.

The Vision and Its Comic World

Frances dreams, or experiences, herself and Gillian flying across a star-studded sky in a sleigh drawn by white horses. Frances has a pile of books in her lap: every book she has written, including foreign-language editions. Their tops are open like cereal boxes, and she reaches into them to pull out handfuls of words and scatter them across the sky. Gillian’s presence in this playful landscape places her inside Frances’s imaginative life, while the books turn Frances’s own writing into tangible material that can be handled and dispersed.

The sleigh also carries Frances’s former husbands, Sol and Henry, who smoke cigarettes and use catapults to kill off unnecessary adjectives. Their absurd editorial game gives the scene a teasing, self-mocking tone rather than the solemnity of a conventional visitation. Gillian belongs naturally in this company: she is part of a social world in which memory, old romantic entanglements, and Frances’s literary identity can all appear together without explanation.

The vision’s jokes do not erase Frances’s grief. When she watches an emu run across the sky, alive again but still unable to fly, she tells Gillian, “I really miss you, Gillian.” The declaration is direct and unadorned, set amid images that are fantastical and comic. Gillian replies that she would say she missed Frances too, but that would not be strictly true because she is in a constant state of bliss. The contrast gives the moment its emotional shape: Frances remains on the side of longing, while Gillian describes a peace that makes ordinary reciprocal loss impossible.

Gillian’s Account of Beauty

Frances compares the beauty around them to the northern lights, but Gillian redirects her attention from a particular spectacle to something more constant. She tells Frances that the beauty is always there, just on the other side, and that Frances must be quiet, stay still, stop talking, and stop wanting in order to hear, feel, or see it. Gillian’s account makes stillness a condition of perception rather than a dramatic revelation: the beauty is not newly created, but already present and usually obscured by restless attention.

Frances’s response exposes the difficulty of following this instruction. She calls the thought interesting, then immediately asks whether she has told Gillian about her review. Gillian tells her to forget the review. The turn is affectionate but pointed: Frances can articulate interest in quiet and beauty, yet her instinct is to return to professional news and conversation. The scene makes Gillian a guide toward attention without turning her into a formal teacher; her guidance is embedded in the familiar rhythm of a friend trying to keep Frances from talking past an experience.

The Friendship Recalled by Frances and Zoe

After the vision, Frances comforts Zoe, who says that she had been angry with her dead twin, Zach, and had felt unable to forgive him for leaving her with lasting pain. Zoe explains that the previous night seemed to bring them into conversation again. Frances responds by connecting Zoe’s experience to her own: she says she spoke with Gillian, who had died the year before, and with her father. She describes the encounters as different from a dream, vivid and, in her words, more real than real life.

Frances does not claim certainty about what happened. When Zoe asks whether they might really have seen the dead, Frances answers, “Maybe,” and the narration identifies this as a lie. The moment distinguishes Frances’s private conviction or uncertainty from the reassurance Zoe is seeking, without resolving the experience for the reader. Gillian’s presence thus extends beyond the vision itself: Frances uses the memory of their encounter to meet Zoe’s grief, but she does not offer the younger woman a confident explanation she cannot honestly guarantee.

Narrative Significance

Gillian’s appearance holds two registers together: the surreal abundance of Frances’s vision and the ordinary intimacy of remembered friendship. The sleigh, the books opened like cereal boxes, the scattered words, and the emu make the encounter unmistakably imaginative in form; the recollection of a drunken kiss, Frances’s admission that she misses Gillian, and her later description to Zoe make it emotionally continuous with their life together. The novel allows the vision to be vivid without declaring it supernatural fact or reducing it to a meaningless dream.

Her advice about quiet also contrasts with Frances’s verbal momentum. Gillian describes a beauty that can be encountered by stopping the habits of talking and wanting, while Frances repeatedly turns back toward speech—first to mention her review, then to recall it when comforting Zoe. That contrast makes Gillian’s role more than a sentimental cameo: through her, the narrative stages a form of attention that Frances can glimpse but does not simply master. Gillian remains at once a lost friend, a figure in a vision, and a voice whose significance lies partly in the uncertainty surrounding what Frances experienced.