Before We Were Strangers

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of cursing and sexual content.

“It hadn’t felt National or Geographic since I had taken a desk job there a few years before. I had come out of the field, where I had seen everything and I went into a hole, where I saw nothing. I was in the middle of the city I loved, back in her arms again, but we were strangers. I was still hanging on to the past and I didn’t know why.”

Matt’s despondent narrative tone captures his dissatisfaction in the narrative present. Matt has worked for National Geographic since he graduated from college but his vocation hasn’t offered him the personal fulfillment for which he longs. He feels as if he has gone “into a hole,” a metaphor that evokes notions of entrapment and loneliness. He also personifies New York City as a woman whose arms are no longer open to him. The new strangeness of the city augments his preexisting dissatisfaction with life and shows that he needs to change. In these ways, the passage launches Matt’s Journey Toward Change, Fulfillment, and Reconciliation.

“Will I find Grace there? I went back and forth between wanting to do everything I could to find her and feeling like it was totally pointless. She’d be with someone. She’d be someone’s wife. Someone better than me. I wanted to get away from everything reminding me that I still had nothing.”

The novel uses the lost love and second chance romance tropes to spur Matt and Grace’s complex love affair. Matt is thrilled to have seen Grace on the subway platform after so many years, but he isn’t sure if life is in fact giving them a chance to start over. He uses a halting, questioning tone that conveys his fear of both opening his heart to Grace again and of losing her again.