55 pages • 1 hour read
Jojo MoyesSomeone Else's Shoes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Benefits of Female Solidarity
Friendships and solidarity between women feature throughout Someone Else’s Shoes, and Moyes highlights how her protagonists’ relationships with other women are beneficial to their social, professional, and future prosperity. This is particularly true of Nisha, who begins the story distrusting other women and believing in the philosophy that “[w]omen smile understandingly at your confidences, then use them against you like weapons” (47). In her defense, Nisha has already suffered a variety of bad experiences at the hands of women in her husband’s social circle and can perhaps be forgiven for her jaded outlook on the nature of female friendship. However, her guilt-ridden memories of appeasing her husband by cutting short a valuable relationship with her best friend, Juliana, demonstrate that her approach to friendship was not always so cynical and that before her unhealthy marriage to an unethical man corrupted her morals, she was once capable of building and fostering mutually beneficial and supportive relationships with other women. It is this ability that proves to be the most valuable skill she regains during the stress of her troubles in London, for upon bonding with Jasmine and learning to allow others to help her, she also regains the mutual sense of trust and respect that grows naturally from healthy relationships. These new revelations are further reinforced by the kindness of both Sam and Andrea, who put aside their reasons for disliking Nisha in order to come to her rescue and help her to retrieve her shoes.
Grand gestures of female solidarity play an important role in the plot of Someone Else’s Shoes, yet even minor gestures of such kindness have a significant impact as well and serve to demonstrate how little accustomed the protagonists are to receiving such kindness. For example, Sam is utterly confused when Miriam Price shows her sympathy when she breaks down at their lunch meeting, yet this instance represents a subtler occurrence of Moyes’s larger theme. The concept is further strengthened by Miriam’s later decision to offer Sam a new job, thus showing how important this solidarity is in allowing women to support each other and gain professional advancement in a world more inclined to reward men than women. Another small yet significant gesture occurs when the traffic officer lets Sam go without a ticket explicitly because she understands what it is like to be menopausal. This small act of kindness between women has a bigger effect toward the end of the novel when Sam tells Nisha about the officer’s kindness and Nisha rewards it by giving the officer a tip “that is going to change [her] life” and help her finally gain the deserved promotion that she has repeatedly been denied (422). While the subplot of the police officer is not vital to the main storyline, it nonetheless serves to emphasize that the kindnesses of female solidarity have a cyclical nature and that showing someone else an unlooked-for kindness will set events in motion and create many unforeseen positive elements in one’s own life.
The Deceptive Nature of Appearances
Throughout the novel, Sam and Nisha judge others by appearance alone and frequently face such judgments themselves. For example, the first impressions that Sam and Nisha have of one another occur before the two even meet. Sam assumes that Nisha and the other “yummy mummies” at the gym are all vain and materialistic because of the way they value their looks (4). Meanwhile, Nisha is “immediately irritated” when she sees Sam slouching and thinks, “If you look like a victim, why are you surprised when people treat you badly?” (16). Though these judgments are somewhat true initially—Nisha’s looks do reflect how much she feels she must adhere to patriarchal standards for women, and her passive stance mirrors her passive nature—these women come to learn that their appearances were deceptive and that each has much more depth of character than their looks let on.
Yet despite the difficulties associated with being misjudged at first glance, the women also use the illusion of appearance to their advantage, particularly when embracing deception to serve their own goals. Nisha’s father once told her that “[p]eople only see what they think they see,” a sentiment that she keeps in mind every time she acts sweet or flirts to get her way, particularly with men (247). Although Nisha does not think of herself as being a particularly nice person, she knows that she can fool others into thinking well of her by smiling and acting innocently: a lesson that harks back to her father’s early lessons in theft and deception. Although the majority of the events in the novel teach her to approach the world more authentically, she is not beneath using her old skills to obtain her goals at a crucial moment, as is evidenced by her success in hoodwinking Carl into believing she has no knowledge of the presence of diamonds within the much-contested Louboutins. The focus on appearances in the novel is especially relevant given Sam and Nisha’s own focus on their appearance as they age. Both women express disdain at the changes that have occurred to them now that they are in their forties. However, because their age and gender lead them to be underestimated by those who hold some form of power over them, Sam and Nisha are both able to take the patriarchal standards that affect the way they appear and use them to their advantage.
The Influence of Coincidence
Someone Else’s Shoes is a story that is full of coincidences that drive the plot forward just as much as any character’s choices, and in this way, Moyes suggests that fate plays as much a role as free will in determining the course of a human life. This dynamic becomes evident very early in the novel, as a handful of awkward coincidences collide to create the impossible situation from which Nisha and Sam will only be able to extricate themselves by working together to help each other. Both women only go to the gym on a whim that day, and both would have remained at the gym much longer if it weren’t for the ill-timed interruptions of Sam’s job and Nisha’s husband. Plenty of other coincidences occur throughout the novel, and the accumulation of such happenings extends far beyond the traditional realm of believability; only the reader’s understanding that Moyes’s novel is in fact a comedy of errors allows the suspension of disbelief to be sustained long enough for the basic premise of the story to be established, at which point curiosity over how the characters will resolve such a bizarre set of problems overcomes any initial sense of incredulity at the improbability of such problems occurring to begin with. Yet despite Moyes’s tendency to show her characters in the grip of fate’s whimsy, it is also clear that many of the character’s actions and choices change their own lives significantly, suggesting that they also have free will and can wield a considerable amount of influence in the quality of their own lives. A comic example of this dynamic occurs when the whims of fate trap Nisha underneath the Frobishers’ hotel bed and Sam demonstrates personal initiative in pulling the fire alarm, which sets Nisha free of this impossible situation. Thus, Moyes suggests that coincidences can influence the characters’ actions but do not control the plot entirely.
As in the example above, the number of coincidences that occur also heightens the comedic elements of Someone Else’s Shoes. At certain moments, the novel dances on the thin line that separates comedy from farce, a genre in which the improbable and absurd are deliberately emphasized. Moyes also further adheres to these literary traditions by allowing her characters to recognize the absurdity of their situations, such as when Sam watches the impact of pulling the fire alarm “disbelievingly” and “laugh[s] at the insane chaos of it all” (359) despite how unbalanced her own life has become. These coincidental and comedic elements change the tone of what could be an otherwise very serious novel and show how Moyes does not stick to just one genre, instead playing with the conventions of several to make Someone Else’s Shoes as lighthearted as it is sincere.
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