58 pages • 1 hour read
Dear Zoe
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Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Tess Construction”
Tess thinks she and David might get along better if she were more precocious, like Em or Zoe. David says if Tess spent half as much time reading as she does on her nails or makeup, she’d get into an Ivy League school. Tess writes often and reads magazines and Chicken Soup books, but she doesn’t enjoy the books she reads for English class. She doesn’t feel an emotional connection even if she understands writers are skilled, and she thought The Crucible was a good story after she saw the movie but didn’t get that from the text. She isn’t popular, but her self-confidence comes from the way she looks. David seems less worried about Em than he does about Tess, and Tess suspects it’s because Em is David’s biological daughter, whereas Tess has her father’s genes.
Tess remembers a time her father picked her up in a new truck shortly after starting his own construction company. He named the company after Tess and arrives to pick up Tess and her friend Amy in a rusted truck labeled Tess Construction on both sides. Tess tells her father she isn’t getting in the truck, and David comes up behind her, holding Zoe, and whispers “just go, sweetie” in Tess’s ear (19). Tess should have been angry with David, she recounts, but instead she felt herself “loving him a little bit for the first time on my own terms” (19). Tess and Amy get in the car with Keisha, a pregnant German Shepherd, and David and Zoe wave from goodbye from the front porch, though Zoe’s wave looks like she isn’t sure Tess is returning.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Roller Coaster”
Besides the therapist’s comment about her mother and David excluding Tess from their grief, Tess isn’t sure therapy is useful. Her case is simple: Zoe will always be dead, and Tess will always be sad. Her first therapist after Zoe’s death ended every session by asking Tess if she felt better, and Tess wanted to respond, “Why shouldn’t the loss of someone you love ruin you?” (22). Tess finds not talking about it, letting time pass, and writing letters to Zoe helpful.
Tess feels she’s more afraid now, while Em is less fearful. Tess remembers a time she babysat Em before Zoe was born. Em cried and said she was lonely, and Tess knew she meant lonely all the time, not just then. Tess was sad.
Tess tells Zoe it’s just as well that she won’t get her period. Tess got hers when she was 11, and her mom took her out for lunch. Getting her period made Tess feel like a gap closed between her and her mother because now Tess could have a baby. Their periods synchronized, and they “were like these two parallel lunatics on side-by-side tracks of a racer roller coaster” (23). When her mother got pregnant with Zoe, Tess missed riding the roller coaster with her.
Tess knows she is a sexual person. She is very attracted to boys but feels they’re useless. She’s hooked up with a lot of boys from her school, but no one has touched her in the right way. She masturbates when she gets home. After three boys touched her and she didn’t enjoy it, she decided she would wait for someone who was worth teaching how to touch her, even if she was 25.
Chapter 6 Summary: “My Face”
Tess feels her face is okay but needs makeup to look pretty. Her morning routine is a big issue between her and David because of how much time it takes and how much money she spends on products. She wakes up at 5:30 and takes a half-hour-long shower, which David finds inefficient. He made Tess write out her whole health and beauty routine to help her make it more efficient. Tess includes her shower, makeup, hair, and clothing routine and says she’s faster than her friends, but David’s not interested in “relative performance.”
Chapter 7 Summary: “Yours”
Tess tells Zoe about the kind of face she had by describing a photograph of Zoe and her mom in front of water. Her mom’s face is obscured, but Zoe is smiling, and “everyone sees Mom’s face in [Zoe’s]” because Zoe’s face “reflected the world and made it beautiful” (30).
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
In Chapter 4, Tess’s descriptions of her father and David further illuminate the class difference between them. While David focuses on the SATs, Harvard, and Yale, Tess’s father is preoccupied with a rotation of junk cars. The latest car, named after Tess, represents a failure of communication between Tess and her father: Her father names the company “Tess Construction” to honor her and show his love, while Tess feels humiliated and can’t fully express why or how to her father. In the same way that Tess struggles to communicate with David and her mother, she struggles with her father, and this failure often leads to her feeling unseen. Indeed, Tess’s anecdote about David whispering “just go, sweetie” yields a powerful emotional revelation about how she loves her stepfather in that moment because she sees him fully for the first time (19). For Tess, to see others fully is to feel love, and the converse is true as well. The moment is doubly significant as it is part of a pattern over the course of the book in which Tess extracts meaning from seemingly insignificant moments, betraying her sensitive nature.
Tess feels she and David have nothing in common, but ironically, both Tess and David are writers. Her claim that she’s not precocious is undercut by her powerful emotional intelligence, strong observational skills, and acute psychological characterization of others around her. While she is very intelligent, she is also a teenager, and throughout the novel, Tess lacks the ability to see herself or her situation clearly. Her obsession with her appearance, makeup, and beauty becomes a motif throughout the book, one that is at first crucial to her understanding of herself: “Whatever self-confidence I have comes from the way I look, or at least the way I think I look” (16).
Tess’s thoughts about her appearance and beauty are often entangled with her burgeoning sexuality, another theme throughout the course of the book. Chapter 15, “Roller Coaster,” foreshadows Tess’s job at an amusement park and her relationship with Jimmy Freeze, who knows how to please Tess sexually. In “Roller Coaster,” Tess notes the limits of therapy but fails to acknowledge that writing her letters to Zoe is a form of therapy, a way of working through her grief. While hyper-focused on her appearance, she often lacks self-awareness and fails to see herself clearly. Ironically, she sees those around her with immense clarity, understanding Em’s existential loneliness from only a few words.
Tess’s extensive makeup routine is, on the one hand, totally normal and unremarkable for a teenage girl in the early 2000s. On the other hand, Tess’s full face of makeup is also a coping mechanism, a symbolic mask she wears to shield herself from grief. The juxtaposition of Chapters 6 and 7, “My Face” and “Yours,” puts Tess’s makeup routine in direct conversation with Zoe’s face, further suggesting the connection between Tess’s use of makeup and her grief over Zoe’s death. In Tess’s understanding, true beauty—as she finds in Zoe’s face, and her mother’s face—transcends makeup and is instead about the way a person sees and interprets the world.
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