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Character profile
Harriet Thorne: main protagonist
Harriet’s great-grandfather was a wealthy and renowned British ornithologist and bird collector, and she has tried to follow his example, partly as a rejection of her anti-science, religious upbringing in a Tenessee cult and partly because she has always found nature and birds, in particular, a fascinating refuge.
As a child, the cult leader abused her, and her mother died of complications from hemophilia because she did not seek medical help and trusted the cult leader’s advice to let God take care of her.
Harriet becomes an ornithology professor at Berkeley and is driven to succeed. However, she suffers from panic attacks and feelings of insecurity and worthlessness, partly brought on by the bullying and manipulation of her half-sister. She is on probation by the department heads and feels that if she fails to draw donors to her research center proposal, she will lose everything.
She had been in a relationship with one of the tenured department heads, but as the novel begins, she finds him cheating on her, exacerbating her life-long distrust of men.
She is sustained by her friendship with Bruno, her colleague who has planned the research center alongside her. However, he is older, and both of them resist their attraction to each other because Harriet does not want to fall into the same patterns of seeking father figures in her relationships, and Bruno wants to set appropriate boundaries to show her she can trust men not to take advantage of her and use her.
As an undergraduate, Harriet studied music and sang vintage jazz in clubs before obtaining her doctorate in ornithology. As a performer, she met a fiddler who broke her heart and whom she continually longs for. She is insecure about her upbringing and constantly tries to enter a world of science and culture she missed as a child. She has a habit of stealing small things, like makeup and silk scarves. She drinks expensive hand-rolled jasmine tea with honey and milk. She has Geisha paintings on her walls and enjoys listening to Bulgarian choral music while taking long hot baths by candlelight.
She has a reckless side, spending money when she doesn’t have it and flirting with men, sometimes giving them the wrong impression. She seeks validation from them but doesn’t want to have sex with them.
She depends heavily on her childhood friend Winnie, who also grew up in the cult and who is now an architecture professor at a community college near Berkeley.
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This discussion was modified 2 days, 6 hours ago by
April Cope.
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This discussion was modified 2 days, 6 hours ago by
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