How to Kill Your Family

At 26, Jimmy met a girl; he’d had other girlfriends, but none so serious as Caro Morton. Reflecting on her feelings of jealousy and loss, Grace writes that she felt “tied to him […]. It’s ridiculous and clichéd and [she] hate[s] that [she] feel[s] it,” but she does (173). She’d never told him about her father, and she’d been so busy planning and carrying out the murder of the Artemises that their contact had petered out. One day, though, Jimmy—now going by Jim—called to tell her about Caro. When Grace met her, she hated the beautiful and “remarkably possessed” woman immediately. Caro was the daughter of a former foreign secretary and a famous author. Just two months after Caro and Jim met, they moved in together. Grace believed Jim had always been in love with her and that she had set the tone of their relationship, preventing an exploration of deeper feelings that could jeopardize their friendship. She admits that while she knows how to exact “epic revenge,” disrupting Caro and Jim’s relationship “felt completely beyond [her] and it made [her] feel like [she] was drowning” (182).

Once Jim moved in with Caro, Grace always had to be the one to initiate communication with him, and this left her feeling angry and “pathetic.