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32. Olly Says
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Everything, Everything, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age
Trust and Lies
Family, Abuse, and Bravery
The Value of Experience
Summary
Analysis
Olly is 10 years old. He sits with his dad at the breakfast bar in their New York City penthouse apartment. His dad makes hot chocolate from scratch and tops Olly’s mug with a dollop of homemade whipped cream. Olly tries to figure out what kind of mood his dad is in, as his moods have been worse than normal. His dad says that the world isn’t deterministic. Olly loves when his dad talks to him like he’s a grown-up, even though he’s not sure what his dad means. This has been happening a lot since his dad was suspended from work. Olly’s dad says this means that one thing doesn’t always lead to another, and that a person can do everything right and still end up in a horrible place. He curses as he says this.
Notice how tuned-in Olly is to his dad’s moods and what his dad says. In many ways, this mirrors how attentive Maddy is to her mom’s moods—and because of this, it adds more evidence to the possibility that Maddy’s mom isn’t as benign or supportive of a force as Maddy thinks she is. However, also note that Olly seems to trust his dad to talk to him like an adult, and that he enjoys the attention. This suggests that at least at one point, Olly idolized his dad and wanted to please him, much like Maddy wants to please Mom.
Themes
A few weeks before, Olly’s mom explained to Olly and Kara that Olly’s dad would be home for a while. Olly heard his parents talking about fraud and an investigation, but he isn’t sure what any of it means. He does feel as though it means that his dad loves him, Kara, and Olly’s mom less. Olly tries to become more loveable to compensate. The phone rings and Olly’s dad answers it. At first, he uses his angry-relaxed voice, but he becomes purely angry and asks if they’re really firing him. Olly feels angry on his dad’s behalf and climbs down from his stool. His dad says that nobody will touch him after this. Olly wants to comfort his dad, but he’s too afraid.
The aside that Olly is trying to be more loveable to compensate for his dad’s inattention illustrates another effect of abuse like this: Olly likely feels responsible at least in some sense for his dad’s bad moods, if only because in his mind, he’s not being loveable enough to keep his dad happy. Olly’s inability to understand what’s going on shows that it’s not necessary to have the experience or the maturity to comprehend what’s going on—Olly can still understand that this means something bad for him and his family.
Themes
Olly’s dad doesn’t get violently drunk until a few months later. He spends his day yelling at financial news shows on television and in the afternoon, mixes vodka, whiskey, and gin in a tall glass. Olly watches his dad stir and remembers the day his dad got fired. He wonders if things would be different if he’d comforted his dad. Olly remembers his dad saying that one thing doesn’t always lead to another, and thinks that no matter how much he wants to fix things, he can’t. In a notebook, Maddy comes up with an equation of variables that might give Olly his answer.
Olly’s musing about whether things would be different had he comforted his dad shows again that he thinks that this is, at least in part, his fault—even if his dad’s discussion of determinism would also tell Olly that it’s not his fault, since one thing (comforting his dad) doesn’t always lead to another (a safe and happy parent).
Themes
