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.
Themes
The Difference Between Selfish and Selfless Love
Auburn negotiates between selfish and selfless love throughout the story. First, she has to leave her first love as he’s dying because, even though Adam has made clear he wants her there, Lydia wants him to spend his remaining time with her. After that, selfishness and selflessness play out between Trey, Owen, Cal, and Auburn.
Selfless love first presents as the willingness to sacrifice one’s needs for another. Owen does this for his father by both getting his father pills and taking responsibility for possession of them when Trey pulls them over. Auburn determines she can’t be with Owen and must choose Trey so she can live with her son. Over time, though, both Owen and Auburn learn that sacrificing what they need for another person isn’t just selfless; it’s harmful. Owen comes to see that his father will keep destroying his own life if Owen keeps enabling his addiction. Auburn learns that Trey is a bad person who will model manipulation and aggression for AJ.
Owen knows that his arrest for possession, even though he took the hit for his father, means Auburn can’t be with him because she would lose her already limited access to AJ. When Owen knows he’s losing her, he’s understanding. Rather than focus on his loss, he apologizes and tells her, “Please don’t allow anyone to make you feel less than you are” (183). When Trey visits him in jail to tell him to stay away from “my girl,” Owen thinks, “The fact that he referred to Auburn as his girl is the last thing I wanted to hear, and that has nothing to do with my jealousy and everything to do with my instincts regarding Trey” (210). Again, he’s upset out of concern and care for her rather than his own desires. When they have sex the night Trey is out of town, Owen refers to his desire for her as “selfish” because he knows she’s already chosen Trey. Auburn tells him she’ll never feel the way she feels with Owen with Trey, and rather than make Owen happy, he gets upset. “I don’t want to think of you having to spend a lifetime with someone who doesn’t deserve you” (238), he says, again putting her well-being above his desires.
Trey, on the other hand, expresses selfish love by being possessive and aggressive. From the moment he realizes Owen is in Auburn’s life, he does his best to warn Auburn against him, using Owen’s false arrest as ammunition. When Auburn runs into Owen at the grocery store, Trey becomes aggressive and boorish as soon as AJ is in his booster seat. He pushes her against the car and with “his voice a deep, threatening whisper” (225), tells her that he needs to know if she and Owen had sex. Trey’s jealousy leads him to do heinous things to both Owen and Auburn. He breaks into Owen’s apartment and plants contraband. Then, finding evidence that Auburn and Owen spent the night together, Trey sexually assaults Auburn. The love he purports to have for Auburn is controlling, abusive, and entirely about what he wants from her.
By the end of the novel, Owen and Auburn learn that selfless love doesn’t mean they have to give up their own well-being. Owen was at the wheel when his mother and brother died, and the guilt led him to enable his father Cal’s drug habit and take the fall when Trey finds pills in Cal’s car. After realizing he’s losing Auburn because he’s been sacrificing so much for Cal, he dumps his father’s remaining pills and says:
We’ve been f*cked up since that night. And every moment since then, the only thing I’ve wanted is to see you try to get better. But you haven’t. It’s just gotten worse, and I can’t sit here and be a part of it. You’re killing yourself, and I won’t let the guilt of seeing you suffer excuse the things I do for you anymore. (220)
Owen knows that it’s one thing to love another person selflessly, and another to enable bad behavior at one’s own expense. Selflessly caring for his father means no more facilitating Cal’s drug use. This new understanding of selfless love leads Owen to tell Auburn, “[S]ometimes in order to save a relationship, you have to sacrifice it first” (263). He knows now that there are times when one must stop trying to make a relationship work. Letting it go is a true act of selfless love.
Auburn takes his advice and arranges it so that both she and Owen are free of Trey, and she gets custody of AJ. Once she releases herself from thinking there is only one way to have AJ–being with Trey–she figures out how to get custody without sacrificing her happiness. She learns that this is the kind of love she wants. “Selflessness,” she narrates. “It should be the basis of every relationship. If a person truly cares about you, they’ll get more pleasure from the way they make you feel, rather than the way you make them feel” (271). Real love is selfless in this manner, something Auburn learns from her relationship with Owen.
Art Heals
Owen sees that his art moves Auburn. She thinks, “It’s somehow sad and breathtaking and beautiful all at once” (25). She’s especially moved by the painting inspired by the confession, “You Don’t Exist, God. And If You Do, You Should Be Ashamed” (32). She doesn’t know that the painting is of Owen’s mother, who died along with his brother in a car crash when Owen was driving. He hadn’t been willing to sell it until now, and when a buyer emerges, Auburn obstructs the sale. She knows the painting means something to Owen and that he hates to think of anyone misunderstanding his art. In the tent Owen bought for Auburn–unknowingly for her son–Owen tells her about his mother and how she prioritized his happiness over all else. “And I miss that”, he tells her. “Sometimes I miss it so much, the only way I can make myself feel better is to paint her” (151). He has around 20 paintings of her, he says. Painting works as a salve for his emotional pain.
Owen has also painted his father. He keeps the painting in the room where he paints, and Auburn is the only person he has allowed into that room. It’s “the room that is the most private part of me. I guess you could say this room holds my confession” (64). He titled the portrait of his father “Nothing But Blues” (64), and he tells Auburn, “It means nothing but lies” (65). He doesn’t plan to bring this one into the studio. It’s just for him, a way to process his relationship with his father. When Owen believes he’s lost Auburn for good, the first thing he does is work on the painting of Auburn he had started. He works on it for three or four days straight, only stopping a few times to eat. This act of creation is what he needs to manage the grief he feels about losing her.
By the end of the novel, the truth about how Owen first knew Auburn is revealed to the reader. Auburn’s love for Adam, which Owen witnessed in the hospital, is the foundation for how Owen became an artist. He took Adam’s paints, which Lydia tried to discard, and he made a painting about that love. He gave it to Adam, who asked Owen to send it to Auburn. That painting of two hands reaching for each other is a source of healing for Auburn because it’s a symbol of Adam she kept after his death. It’s healing for Owen too, both because it’s his first painting–the beginning of how art became important to him–and because he started painting amid the trauma he endured when his mother and brother died.
The painting is additionally meaningful for Owen because he painted it based on Auburn’s love for Adam, a love that gave Owen hope during an agonizing time in his life. When Owen and Auburn were in the hospital–she with Adam, he with his father–Owen wondered whether he’d rather be in Adam’s shoes, dying, or his own as someone who lost his mother and brother forever. Auburn’s love for Adam saves him, “Because I still have a chance of being loved like that someday” (298). That love became the painting, and the painting saved them both.
The Dangers of Keeping Secrets
When Owen and Auburn meet, they carry secrets from their past they don’t want the other to know. Both believe keeping those secrets hidden will keep the other from being scared away. Secrets are a common trope in romance novels. Secrets can create obstacles to romance between the main characters, and narrative tension escalates as the possibility of the secret coming out increases. Hoover goes further and uses the characters’ secrets to reveal how secrets can cause harm, but only if the secret is built on fear or selfishness.
Owen’s secret harms his life dramatically. By trying to protect his father, presumably out of guilt, he winds up in jail and faces the possibility of serving a sentence. He’ll lose his studio, which is his livelihood and passion. Most important to him, he’ll lose Auburn. When she asks why he didn’t tell her Trey had arrested him under false pretenses, he tells her there was no easy way to reveal the truth. Owen’s secret had snowballed to the point that it didn’t just jeopardize his and his father’s careers but his ability to be close to Auburn due to Trey and Lydia’s judgment of him. He says that it was too late to tell the truth because Trey had shown the extremes to which he would go to get what he wants. On the surface, Owen’s enabling behavior looks kind, but he’s behaving selfishly because the situation allows him to focus on someone else rather than doing the difficult work of healing his trauma. If he stops abetting his father’s drug use, they’ll both have to take responsibility for their lives, which means letting go of their past.
Auburn’s first secret is that she has a son, a secret she keeps out of shame because her mother-in-law limits her access to him, which makes her feel like a bad mother. Her second secret is that she’s in love with Owen and can’t let Trey know. Because she keeps her feelings secret, Trey continues to believe that she will be with him to access AJ. Trey’s aggression and jealousy grow bigger each time Owen gets in his way. He tries to destroy Owen’s life by planting drugs in his apartment, and he sexually assaults Auburn. As such, her secrets become dangerous in ways she hadn’t expected.
Throughout the story, there is one secret Owen holds on to, one that defines his selfless character. This secret is that he painted the painting on Auburn’s wall, and he won’t tell her because it would take away from the meaning the painting has for her. It’s the last thing she received from Adam, and she believes Adam painted it. For Owen, the painting is equally as meaningful as Adam’s confession that inspired it. Owen painted the painting for Auburn and Adam’s love, and he doesn’t want to tarnish that with his involvement.
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By Colleen Hoover
