51 pages • 1 hour read
Colleen HooverConfess
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Auburn Mason Reed
Auburn, the protagonist, turns 21 soon after the story begins. She moved to Dallas from Portland to be near her son, AJ, who she conceived with her boyfriend, Adam, when she was 16. Adam died from cancer before she knew she was pregnant, and Adam’s mother Lydia has full custody of AJ. Auburn is most tormented by how Lydia gatekeeps Auburn’s time with AJ. Auburn feels she’ll do anything to be able to be with her son. This is the premise under which she meets Owen and is the obstacle she will face to be with him. The tension between her core desire–to be with her son–and her desire for Owen creates a classic romance genre plot.
Auburn believes she needs to keep her past secret as she’s hesitant to trust anyone with her heart or her son. She wants Owen, but she needs Lydia, as Lydia is her access to her son. Every decision she makes is made with that need in mind, to the point that she comes close to sacrificing herself in its pursuit. This plays out largely with her attempt to date Trey, someone to whom she’s not attracted and who isn’t a good person. As a result, Auburn’s character arc is about learning The Difference Between Selfish and Selfless Love and how to love without sacrificing herself in the process. Through her relationship with Owen, she comes to understand that giving up her desires for someone else has its limits. She feels she can’t be with Owen because, based on Trey’s manipulations, Lydia would never let Auburn have AJ. She narrates, “I’m so tired of having to give up the only things in life I want” (171). She has had to give up Adam, her son, college, living in Portland, and now Owen. All those losses originated with losing Adam to cancer. The quote foreshadows that something must change if she wants to stop living this way, and Owen is the vehicle for this transformation. By the end of the story, Owen helps her see that loving selflessly includes letting go of control. She learns to stop fighting against the natural pull of their love and to stop trying to create a love that doesn’t exist with Trey. Only once she lets go of those efforts does she realize a way to have all she wants and needs.
Owen Mason Gentry
Owen is a 21-year-old artist who paints from anonymous confessions solicited from the public. His paintings reveal the strong emotions behind those confessions. He tells Auburn that knowing so many people put up a façade in the world makes him feel less alone. This is a hint that he, too, hides secrets. Owen’s biggest secret, the one he never reveals to Auburn, is that they were at the same hospital when they were teenagers–she for Adam and he for his father. There, he witnessed Auburn’s love for Adam, and Owen hoped he would “have a chance of being loved like that someday” (298). That possibility makes him want to live, even after the trauma of losing his mother and brother in a car accident.
That time in the hospital is when he first began to paint, using Adam’s art supplies that Lydia planned to discard. He created the painting that Adam asked Owen to send to Auburn before he died. For this reason, he doesn’t want her to know he recognizes her when she arrives at his studio five years later. If she knew, she would learn Adam hadn’t painted her that picture, and that knowledge would taint the last thing Adam gave her. This kind of secret is typical of Owen’s selfless character.
His other secret regards how he tries to help his father. He enables his father’s addiction by supplying pills, and he takes the heat when Trey pulls them over and finds the pills. This shows how he takes his selflessness too far, and it’s Auburn’s presence in his life that finally makes him stop. If he continues helping his father like this, he’ll lose Auburn for good. He comes to understand that it’s not his father who’s hurting his life but himself. This is how he learns The Difference Between Selfish and Selfless Love, and he helps Auburn learn this too. Loving selflessly doesn’t mean abandoning oneself. As he tells Auburn “[S]ometimes in order to save a relationship, you have to sacrifice it first” (263). After releasing control over his father’s addiction, his father chooses to get help on his own.
Owen’s character is archetypical of male love interests in romance novels. His selfless, unconditional love makes him an ideal man. He is good-looking, successful, and a bit of a bad boy, but he’s also someone who loves Auburn with “agape love,” or selfless love, which is the ideal kind of love according to the ancient Greeks. Owen is, therefore, an unusual and special person.
Trey
Trey is Adam’s older brother and Lydia’s son. He’s a policeman who grows increasingly aggressive and cruel throughout the novel. Owen’s foil, Trey’s greatest character flaw is his selfishness. He wants Auburn all to himself, and he’ll do anything to ensure that happens, including using her son as leverage. The more evidence he gets that Auburn doesn’t want him, the worse his behavior becomes.
Trey remembers Owen as the kid who punched him when he was trying to get Auburn to leave Adam and go to the airport, and he hasn’t let it go. He takes the opportunity to punish Owen when he claims his father’s pills as his own, even though he knows Owen isn’t culpable. It comes clear to Trey that Owen and Auburn keep going back to each other, so he breaks into Owen’s studio, destroys his art, and plants drugs.
Auburn won’t choose Trey no matter how much he tries to control her and the situation. His character never learns The Difference Between Selfish and Selfless Love and he continues to act out of selfishness. The tension from his selfishness and attempts to seize control leads to him sexually assaulting Auburn, which is the final straw for her. Trey’s character changes in that he admits defeat by the end of the novel, but there’s no sense that he’ll change his manipulative and abusive ways.
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