The Seven Year Slip

“She was an icon among bookish people, the person they all wanted to be. The person I wanted to be. Someone who had her life together. Someone who had a plan, had goals, and knew the exact tools she needed to implement them.”

This quote shows how Clementine thinks of her boss, Rhonda Adder. Though Clementine discusses her work and lifestyle, she especially emphasizes the fact that Rhonda seems to have a plan for her life and knows how to follow it. Through her descriptions of Rhonda, Clementine reveals that she craves stability, though the specificity of working at Strauss & Adder may not be her passion.

“‘When was the last time you did something for the first time?’ he asked, as if daring me. And if there was one thing I was more than a practical pessimist, it was someone who never backed away from a challenge. I resisted. ‘I assure you I’ve danced before.’ ‘But not with me.’ No.”

This exchange between Iwan and Clementine shows how Iwan helps her to give way to the person she becomes by the end of the novel. At this point in the novel, Clementine has lost her sense of adventure and wants everything to remain stagnant, and Iwan’s question hits a nerve for her. Yet, Clementine does give in and dance with him, showing her potential for growth as a dynamic character.

“She had always told me to chase the moon. To surround myself with people who would lasso it down in a heartbeat. It was easy for her. She was the main character in her own story, and she knew it. And, for a part of it, I think she was the main character in mine, too. Compared to her, I was a shadow.”

Much like how she describes Rhonda, Clementine describes Analea in this quote in a way that highlights Analea’s virtues but underscores Clementine’s faults. Clementine often makes choices for others rather than for herself, and in many ways, she shapes her life to be like Analea’s. This quote highlights her insecurities about herself and how she views herself as someone less than the main character in her own story.

“It felt nice to do something for me again. To just be. No to-do lists to keep pushing myself through, no expectations. Just me. And while I didn’t feel like the child who used to curl up in a claw-foot tub to paint, I did feel…safe.”

Clementine comes to this realization once she picks up watercolor painting for the first time since Analea’s death. Unlike most other things she does, painting does not affect her career or stability but is something she does just for the sake of enjoying it. This quote shows how Clementine’s perspective is beginning to shift and how she begins to find her passion again.

“I had been so focused on looking ahead, catapulting myself toward the next step in my plan, the rest of the world a blur so I didn’t get hurt—I hadn’t looked around me. Hadn’t been part of the world. Part of anything, really. I’d just gone through it, head down, heart shuttered, like a traveler against a torrential rainstorm.”

Clementine says this after she discovers that Iwan has become a famous chef. Despite looking for him for weeks, Clementine realizes he is everywhere. This quote shows how much Clementine is stuck in the past and the future rather than the present, and how her view of what she thinks she needs to do obscures everything else around her. She also directly ties this into her fear of getting hurt, showing how her plan for her life is a coping mechanism for her.

“Just six weeks ago—or seven years ago, I suppose—he was telling me with great enthusiasm about his friend’s fajita recipe and his grandfather, who never made the same lemon pie twice. That was the man who wrote the Eater article. Not this one. And his recipes weren’t hidden behind a skill-set paywall, inaccessible to anyone who didn’t know what jus was.”

This quote comes just after Clementine meets Iwan in the present and sees how his views about food have changed drastically. Iwan’s passion for making the perfect meal in the past emphasizes his feelings that good food does not need high-end ingredients or inaccessible skills. Yet, when she meets James, the view he presents at the Strauss & Adder meetings seems to be the exact opposite, causing Clementine to question her fundamental beliefs about him.

“The thing no one tells you, the thing you have to find out on your own through firsthand experience, is that there is never an easy way to talk about suicide. There never was, there never will be. If ever someone asked, I’d tell them the truth: that my aunt was amazing, that she lived widely, that she had the most infectious laugh, that she knew four different languages and had a passport cluttered with so many stamps from different countries that it’d make any world traveler green with envy, and that she had a monster over her shoulder she didn’t let anyone else see.”

This is the first time in the novel that Clementine directly mentions her aunt’s death by suicide. The novel suggests that grief presents itself in a number of ways, including Clementine’s refusal to embrace her ownership of the apartment, Clementine’s mourning of her former self, and her living in her aunt’s apartment while she comes to terms with Analea’s suicide. Clementine reflects on how Analea presented herself one way but “had a monster over her shoulder she didn’t let anyone else see.” Clementine always tries to remember the best things about her aunt, yet her view of her is often somewhat altered by her death by suicide.

“This was the part of him I feared had disappeared, but he’d just schooled it and kept it hidden for friends who wouldn’t give up his secret.”

Clementine says this when she begins to see bits of the old Iwan when they are around his friends. She starts to believe that how Iwan presents himself as James Ashton is merely a facade hiding who he truly is and that this facade only comes down around people he trusts completely.

“‘No, sorry—I just—I missed this.’ And I motioned to him. ‘Me boring you with food?’ he asked. I shook my head. ‘You being passionate about it.’ A conflicted look crossed his brows. ‘I’m always passionate about it.’ Why don’t you show it more often, then? I wanted to ask, but I felt that might be a little rude. Besides, seven years made him almost a stranger, so who was I to say anything, anyway? ‘I know, I just—I missed it. In the’—I waved my hand absently—’seven years. It was a long time.’”

This quote continues to emphasize Clementine’s complicated feelings about the person Iwan has become over the last seven years. Though Iwan has changed, in many ways he has stayed the same, and he tries to tell this to Clementine. This quote also shows how their two different perspectives of time influence Clementine and Iwan differently.

“I took one last bite of chicken fajita, studying him in the streetlights. ‘Do you regret it?’ ‘If I said I did,’ he replied, looking thoughtful, ‘would that be a disservice to the past me who dreamed of getting here? Probably.’ But then a slow smile spread across his lips, honeyed and coy. ‘Though it’s a good thing I don’t. But…’ He hesitated. ‘I do regret not being there. For you,’ he added. ‘When your aunt passed. I regret that.’”

This exchange between Clementine and Iwan shows just how worried Clementine is about Iwan’s success. Iwan’s point about doing a disservice to his past self highlights what many of his friends see about him working not for himself but for someone else. His regret that he was not there for Clementine when her aunt passed also shows how complicated his feelings about her became after they met seven years earlier, and how he still cared for her despite her not knowing who he was.

“But what scared me wasn’t the fact that I hadn’t even thought twice about kissing him—it was that I hadn’t cared about my career at all. About what Rhonda would think. About throwing away seven years of overtime and sleepless weekends and papercuts.”

Clementine worries about this after Iwan nearly kisses her but then reminds her of their professional relationship. Clementine is torn between what she wants and what she thinks she wants in this situation, and though she is beginning to change her perspective, she has not yet made the leap to living for herself rather than for her career.

“That was the thing about my aunt, she lived in the moment because she always figured it’d be her last […] I loved how she spent every moment making a memory, every second living wide and full, and I hated that she never thought—never once entertained the idea—that she would have another dance in the rain.”

In this quote Clementine compares the way Analea lived with the way she died, showing the eerie compatibility between the two that she only recognized after Analea’s suicide. This continues to highlight Clementine’s complex feelings about her aunt’s death and how she greatly struggles with her grief.

“And, oh, did I realize then, that I had the thirst for adventure sown into my very bones. I missed that girl, but I felt her coming back now, little by little, and I didn’t quite hate the thought of something new anymore. The longer I sat here, in this small cubicle, the more I began to wonder what, exactly, I was working toward.”

At this moment in the novel, Clementine begins to question what she actually wants and what she has been working toward. She recognizes that her desire for adventure is incompatible with the confined life she has laid out for herself, though she can’t yet decide to quit her job to pursue what would make her happy.

“‘Isn’t it strange how the world works sometimes? It’s never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.’ It was, wasn’t it.”

Vera tells this to Clementine when they are discussing James’s success. Vera claims that Analea letting him use her apartment for free led to the restaurant opening. Though this quote is about this specific instance, it can apply to several relationships within the novel, particularly those who were affected by the time slip in Apartment B4. It highlights Clementine’s changing views about her relationship with Iwan and how it is not the time but the timing that they struggle with.

“I didn’t want to be here—because he was right about one thing. Clementine West, a senior publicist at Strauss & Adder, wouldn’t have noticed Iwan at all if he’d just been a dishwasher […] But Lemon, overworked and exhausted Lemon, loved that crooked-mouthed dishwasher she’d met displaced in time, and she came to work with watercolors under her nails on accident, and she took travel guides from the free bookshelves near the elevators, and she had an itch under her skin, and a passport full of stamps, and a wild heart.”

This quote shows how Clementine often separates her true self from the version of herself she presents to the world. Though she berates Iwan for changing with his success, she eventually comes to recognize that the person she had become over seven years would not have noticed Iwan if he was still a dishwasher and not a famous chef. This quote represents one of Clementine’s pivotal moments as she begins to recognize that all change isn’t bad.

“I didn’t know that no one had ever told her that she deserved more. I didn’t know that she had been thinking about calling it quits for a while. I didn’t know how unhappy she had been. How miserable. She said she hadn’t realized it until I said she deserved better. A cold, hard realization curled in my stomach, because as she finally let go of me and told me that I was right, I thought about my small cubicle, the paintings of landscapes I hung up across my corkboard, and the piles of travel guides I had stashed in my desk drawer […] And I realized that I was unhappy, too.”

Clementine says this after she tells Juliette that she deserves better than to stay with her awful boyfriend. Though Juliette says she didn’t realize she deserves better until Clementine tells her, Clementine doesn’t notice this either until she tells Juliette. This is when Clementine begins to see the importance living for herself instead of only for stability.

“Because I felt like I had wasted her time for seven years. For shaving off parts of myself, over and over again, to squeeze into the expectations I thought I needed to set for myself. I was never going to wear heels and blazers—I didn’t want that anymore, and it was scary to think about, but a little thrilling, too.”

When Clementine finally quits her job, she feels that she has wasted both Rhonda’s time and her own, as she has spent years dedicated to something she would not ultimately pursue. Others try to assure her that she hasn’t wasted her time and that she was merely learning along the way, yet she finds it hard to believe that “shaving off parts of” herself could be in any way beneficial.

“You will be happiest when you’re on your own adventure. Not Analea’s, not whoever you’re dating, not everyone who thinks you should do what you’re supposed to do—yours.”

Clementine’s mother tells her this when she inadvertently reveals that she has quit her job. Though she thought her parents would see her as a quitter, they are happy to see she is not giving her time to something that makes her unhappy. This quote also emphasizes how Clementine often shapes her life around those of others and how she needs to be herself in order to be happy.

“But in trying to be Rhonda, I’d never stopped to think about what parts of myself I’d shaved away. I guess, sort of like James. We had grown up, and grown apart, in different ways.”

Though Clementine criticizes Iwan for changing, here she begins to recognize the ways she has also changed. Though she considers this to be growing apart, it shows how Iwan and Clementine are more alike than not.

“And I told him a strange story, about a place between places that bled like watercolors. A place that felt, sometimes, like it had a mind of its own. I only told him the magical bits, the parts that clung to my bones like warm soup in winter. I told him about my aunt and the woman she loved across time, and her fear of good things going sour, and I told him about her niece, who was so afraid of something good that she settled for safe, that she shaved off so much of herself to fit the person she thought she wanted to be.”

Clementine says this once she has explained the magic of the apartment to Iwan, only including the happy parts much like Analea did when she was a child. This quote shows the many ways Clementine has followed in Analea’s footsteps and how she too let her fear of change consume her life. Clementine continues to use the phrase “shaving off pieces of herself” to highlight how she has changed and how she now recognizes that she has changed.

“Seven years ago, I was someone else entirely, trying on different hats to see which one fit best, which skin I was comfortable with sharing. Seven years ago, he was this bright-eyed dishwasher with soap under his nails, wearing overstretched shirts, trying to find his dream, and in the present, he was glossy and sure of himself, though when he smiled, the cracks showed, and they were cracks that most people probably didn’t want to see. But I loved them, too. That was love, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just a quick drop—it was falling, over and over again, for your person. It was falling as they became new people […] Love was an invitation into the wild unknown, one step at a time together. And I loved this man so much, I needed to let him go. This him. The one in my past.”

This quote comes as Clementine decides to let go of the Iwan that is in her past and tell the one that is in her present that she loves him. She describes falling in love multiple times as an experience rather than an instant event, detailing how she loves Iwan for both his past and present self. This also further highlights her acceptance of the fact that both of them have changed but have also stayed the same in many ways.

“It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. It was the kind of pain that didn’t exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it. Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.”

“It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. It was the kind of pain that didn’t exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it. Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.”

“The sadness will last forever. It wasn’t a lie. There was sadness, and there was despair, and there was pain—but there was also laughter, and joy, and relief. There was never grief without love or love without grief, and I chose to think that my aunt lived because of them. Because of all the light and love and joy that she found in the shadows of everything that plagued her. She lived because she loved, and she lived because she was loved, and what a lovely lifetime she gave us.”

Clementine analyzes one of her aunt’s favorite quotes from van Gogh as she sits before one of his paintings. Though she sees how sadness will last forever, just like her grief, she also knows that there can also be happiness mingled with it.