Expectations and the Failures of Family Theme Analysis

Nineteen Minutes is full of characters who have been misunderstood, let down, and actively harmed by their families. Indeed, because the novel focuses on the many problems faced by teenagers, it is especially attentive to the ways in which parents fail their children, particularly during the middle and high school years. Alarmingly, the novel shows that families fail even when they are full of love; one of the story’s key messages is that love is not enough to understand, support, and protect someone. Even worse, too much love can actually be damaging, for example when a parent only sees an idealized version of their child and misses the truth of who they are. Yet by depicting families that manage to remain loving despite going through horrific circumstances, the novel does show how familial love and support can be powerful and transformative. Crucially, the best familial relations are shown to be those where there are no expectations, only a willingness to see the person for exactly who they are. 

The most important character in the novel’s exploration of the failures of family is Lacy, Peter’s mother, whose world is turned upside down when Peter commits a mass shooting at his high school. Lacy is a loving parent and a kind-hearted person—her job as a midwife emphasizes her nurturing side. Lacy’s capacity for unconditional love is demonstrated by the fact that, even though she is horrified by Peter’s crime, she still loves him and treasures the memories of the person she thought he was. The extraordinary nature of Lacy’s love for Peter is demonstrated by her own reflection that “true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated.” Although it takes time, Lacy is also keen to interrogate the role she played in creating a situation in which her son murdered 10 people. She ends up shouldering a large share of the responsibility, reflecting, “Children didn’t make their own mistakes. They plunged into the pits they’d been led into by their parents.” The fact that she comes to believe she is to blame for what Peter did further emphasizes the idea that Lacy is a devoted, self-sacrificial mother. Yet this, in turn, suggests that even loving parents like Lacy can raise children who commit terrible wrongs.

The novel suggests that the reason why even parents who love their children still fail them is because of the hopes and expectations that parents tend to have. Peter himself articulates this problem when he observes, “Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots.” As Peter notes, the reality is that it’s much more likely for children to grow up to be unsuccessful, unpopular, and unhappy, yet parents are ill-equipped to deal with this due to their own hopes and expectations. Rather than facing the sad truth that their children have failed to live up to these expectations, parents often avoid confronting reality. This is true of Peter’s parents, Lacy and Lewis, who are ignorant of the fact that Peter’s smart, successful, and popular brother, Joey, was a heroin user. It is of course also true when Lacy and Lewis ignore the signs that Peter is isolated, miserable, and planning to seek revenge against the people who bully him.

Lacy expresses the uncanny possibility of not knowing one’s own child when she thinks, “How could you change a boy’s bedding every week and feed him breakfast and drive him to the orthodontist and not know him at all?” This sentence, which is about Peter, captures the way in which even loving families fail. Precisely because Lacy was so devoted to Peter and dedicated to ensuring that he had a positive, happy life, she refuses to see the reality that he has become a hateful, violent person. Indeed, Lacy herself reflects that it is the very nature of expectation itself that creates this problem. In a flashback, when she realizes that Joey stole money from her wallet, she thinks, “No matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint.” 

Although the novel mostly focuses on the way parents fail their children by having high expectations, it also considers how the reverse can be true through its depiction of Alex Cormier and her daughter, Josie, who feels she can’t live up to her mother’s picture-perfect persona. Alex and Josie have an intense relationship due to the fact that—having become pregnant with Josie by a married man, Logan Rourke, who wanted her to have an abortion—Alex is a single mother who must juggle her parenting with the enormous demands of her work as a judge. The novel describes how Alex puts pressure on herself to have a pristine public image due to the nature of her job. Yet this doesn’t just affect her role in the community—it also affects Josie, who at one point becomes exasperated about her own inability to live up to the example set by her “perfect” mother. This is yet another way in which the novel explores how even close-knit families can misperceive and misunderstand each other. While parents often misunderstand their children due to their high expectations of them, children can also misunderstand their parents due the high esteem in which they regard them. These interrelated issues suggest that the nature of families—which prevent relatives from fully seeing each other, and encourages them to have unrealistically high hopes and expectations for each other—can make family members alienated from each other, even when they also love each other deeply.