The Drowning Woman

The novel emphasizes how preconceived notions often differ dramatically from lived experience, as evident in Lee’s frequent reflections on how her previous understanding of being unhoused differs from her experience of it:

What did I think of the homeless before I became one of them? Not much, is the short answer. Each year, I donated to a local shelter that served Thanksgiving dinners. I occasionally tossed coins into hats or empty coffee cups, but I didn’t meet their eyes, I didn’t ask their names. Sometimes I’d even cross the street to avoid them. I was not without compassion for the displaced, but they were just so separate, so other. There was no way I’d ever become one of them (3).

Lee’s candid acknowledgement of her previously superficial understanding of the unhoused population and how she didn’t think of them much contrasts with the detailed reality of her experience in the opening scene: While she’s attempting to sleep in the driver’s seat of her car, a man breaks her car window and robs her. In addition, Lee is extremely conscious of how people see her in her current situation compared to how they would have seen her in her previous life. Seeing two put-together women in the pool locker room, she thinks that if they’d seen her in her restaurant, “[t]hey might even have envied [her].