51 pages • 1 hour read
Goodman Sara ConfinoDon't Forget to Write: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 25-36Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
Ada calls to check in on Marilyn and Sally. She will be back in four days. Marilyn and Freddy keep up their affair. Freddy’s parents are eager for him to marry her, but Freddy insists that his interest in Marilyn has nothing to do with her family’s wealth and status. Marilyn worries that by dating Freddy openly, she will lose Ada’s respect.
Chapter 26 Summary
Ada returns home and does not appear to suspect that Marilyn has been seeing Freddy. Marilyn realizes that she missed Ada. The two of them drive to the nearby town of Stone Harbor to get ice cream at Lillian’s favorite parlor. Marilyn resents Lillian’s presence in Ada’s life, as she is only a paid companion instead of family. Marilyn asks if Ada has been in love, and she says that she has been in love twice, but she refuses to elaborate. Ada also notes that she knows that Marilyn has been in her room.
Chapter 27 Summary
Marilyn and Ada resume their matchmaking work, and Marilyn is unable to see Freddy for several days. She eventually sees him at the beach, and they arrange to go on another date. Marilyn also asks him for the names of any single Jewish men he knows, as Ada needs more matches for her clients. When Marilyn returns to the house, she finds Ada reading her writing. Although she is embarrassed and resents the intrusion, she is gratified when Ada compliments her work.
Chapter 28 Summary
Freddy and Marilyn go on another date, though they must sneak around again so that Ada does not catch them. They sit in the backseat of Freddy’s car and discuss the future. Marilyn notes that Freddy has never asked about her interests and does not even know about her writing. She realizes that he wants her to be a housewife, which she does not want for herself. A police officer sees them in the car and warns them to move on so that they do not get fined for public indecency. Marilyn is embarrassed, and she tells Freddy that while she might marry him someday, she is not ready yet.
Chapter 29 Summary
The next day, Marilyn had planned to meet Shirley at the library, but Shirley does not show up. After waiting for a while, Marilyn heads toward home, only to run into Shirley, who is out of breath. She has news: Freddy is engaged to be married. A young woman he was dating before he met Marilyn has just shown up, and she is pregnant. Freddy must marry her to save her reputation, but he is not happy about it. Marilyn is horrified, but Shirley treats the situation like a form of entertainment.
Marilyn goes home. Freddy arrives shortly thereafter to talk to her. He begs her to marry him, but she refuses, insisting that he take care of his fiancée and child. Ada comforts Marilyn after Freddy leaves. Marilyn is worried that she might be pregnant, and Ada assures her that she will support her no matter what happens.
Chapter 30 Summary
Ada asks Marilyn if she is heartbroken when she wakes up the next morning. Marilyn is upset, but her heart is not broken. Ada is unwilling to let Marilyn wallow. She cancels her clients for a few days and entertains Marilyn while they wait for her period to start. Ada tells Marilyn that she was once engaged. She and her fiancé were friends, and their parents wanted them to marry, but they were not in love. He died in a fire. After that, Ada became a nurse instead of marrying. She does not say anything about the people she has been in love with when Marilyn asks. Marilyn’s cycle starts on time, to her immense relief. Ada tells her that she can no longer take part in matchmaking because of her affair with Freddy but that she will have other work to do instead.
Chapter 31 Summary
Marilyn tries to write, but she is still upset. She goes for a walk and wishes that she could be free to choose her own life. She is unhappy that Lillian will soon be arriving to take up more of Ada’s time. Marilyn reflects on the class differences between her family and Freddy’s and decides that they do matter, after all. She is glad that they are no longer together.
Chapter 32 Summary
Thomas arrives with many large cardboard boxes full of photographs from Ada’s life. Marilyn’s new job will be to sort through all of them and put them into photo albums in chronological order. Marilyn finds photographs of her great-grandparents alongside Ada and her sister (Marilyn’s grandmother) when they were little girls. From the photos, she learns that after Ada and her sister were born, Ada’s mother gave birth to a baby boy who lived only a few months and then became pregnant again but miscarried.
Chapter 33 Summary
A few days into Marilyn’s work with the photographs, Freddy shows up and asks to speak to her again. He says that he misses her and is desperate to be with her, but Marilyn has no sympathy for him anymore. She starts writing a new story about a complex family, inspired by the old photographs. She also settles more happily into her life with Ada, staying up late to write each evening.
Chapter 34 Summary
The first album that Marilyn finishes chronicles the first decade of Ada’s life. Ada is pleased with it. The two of them visit a beauty parlor, where Ada has the stylist give Marilyn a haircut that is “something like what that Jackie Kennedy is wearing” (226). That evening, they get dressed up to go to Atlantic City. Ada gives Marilyn a mink stole and lends her some beautiful jewelry for the night, though she still forbids her from wearing red lipstick.
Chapter 35 Summary
The first stop of the evening is a seafood restaurant called Hackney’s. As always, everyone knows Ada, and everyone admires how stylish Ada and Marilyn are. Ada encourages Marilyn to try mussels and lobster, both of which Marilyn finds unexpectedly delicious. Ada tells Marilyn that she must “always say yes to new things” so that she can write about them more effectively (238). After dinner, they walk to a bar with an exclusive club lounge in it. Frank Sinatra is set to perform.
Chapter 36 Summary
Marilyn is over the moon after Sinatra’s performance. She is even more surprised when she and Ada are invited backstage. It turns out that Ada and Sinatra are old friends, and he gives Marilyn an autographed photo. As they drive home, Ada tells Marilyn why Rose visited her for the summer all those years ago. She was in love with a young man who promised to marry her but abandoned her instead. She was pregnant at 18 and did not know what to do. She miscarried, and Ada took care of her. The following year, she married Walter, who promised her security even though he could not promise an exciting life or true love.
Chapters 25-36 Analysis
By this point in the story, Confino has included many hints that Ada and Lillian are a couple and not, as Marilyn continues to assume, an employer and a paid companion. Marilyn’s unwillingness or inability to put two and two together is partly indicative of the period in which the book is set, when LGBTQ+ people were much less likely to be public about their identities. It is also partly due to Marilyn’s relatively sheltered upbringing and her lack of knowledge about people whose lives are substantially different from her own. She notes at one point, for instance, that she hardly knows anybody who is not Jewish and has only left New York City a handful of times.
Marilyn is still struggling in her life with Romance and Making Matches. She knows that dating Freddy is a bad idea, and she is ultimately proven right. Marilyn’s reluctance to marry Freddy despite his insistence highlights her growing awareness that romantic desire alone does not suffice for a successful partnership. Based on previous actions and her convictions, Marilyn knows that Freddy expects her to be a dutiful housewife—something she views as fundamentally impossible. This is an important aspect of Marilyn’s coming-of-age journey, as her time with Ada helps her see her desires and goals more clearly.
Ada helps Marilyn see the separation between romance and matchmaking further: She has been in love twice, but she has never been married, and she was not in love with her fiancé. Ada understands, and Marilyn is now realizing, that marriages are not only romantic but also political and practical as well. People might be romantically attracted to each other, like Marilyn and Freddy, but they might make a poor match. Ada’s life experience and the wisdom she uses to counsel Marilyn underscores the distinction between romantic attraction and the practical considerations that must underpin a marriage—even more so for someone like Marilyn, who has aspirations that she is unwilling to give up should she become a wife.
Expectations and pressures of Family and Duty can push people into marriages that might not make them happy, as the narrative demonstrates. For women especially, the dangers of having sex outside of marriage in 1960 were significant. Freddy and his fiancée must spend their lives together to save their reputations, and Marilyn learns that her mother experienced the same thing when she was young, as she got pregnant outside of marriage. After she miscarried, she retreated from social scorn by getting married and assuming a traditional housewife role. Her mother’s experiences reflect how societal expectations and the constant threat of a tarnished reputation confine women like Rose to roles that prioritize saving one’s respectability rather than pursuing personal desire. When Marilyn believes that she might be pregnant, she experiences this fear herself. Her reaction underscores the extreme anxiety associated with deviating from societal norms and the potential repercussions of not conforming. She ultimately realizes that she has narrowly avoided a situation where she would have had to marry a man who is not even interested in her writing or who she is as a person.
Ada continues to guide Marilyn toward Living a Nontraditional Life as an unmarried woman. She pushes Marilyn to try new things, such as non-Kosher seafood, so that she can go beyond tradition and experience life fully. Both Ada and Marilyn are Jewish, but they express no strong religious beliefs; their ties to Judaism are primarily familial and cultural, which gives them some more leeway in choosing which traditions to incorporate into their lives and which to ignore. Their more fluid approach to Judaism demonstrates how they can embrace cultural heritage in ways that facilitate their personal freedom and greater autonomy. Marilyn now recognizes that her writing has merit: She could make a career out of it instead of treating it as a hobby. This realization marks a notable shift in Marilyn’s self-perception and priorities, highlighting her growing, serious commitment to her aspirations over conventional expectations. She experiences a significant character shift when she realizes that her writing is more important in her life than Freddy is, a key takeaway that influences her actions throughout the remainder of the novel.
