You Should Read BEAR by Julia Phillips
Reading Notes
How I love a book I’m not quite sure what to do with. A book I can’t easily describe. A book that sticks with me the way, after a bite of toffee, caramel pockets itself in my teeth and releases a subtle sweetness long after the bite has been consumed.
Bear is such a book.
Sisters Sam and Elena live in a “1979 vinyl-sided nightmare, a too-small two- bedroom” home on picturesque San Juan Island (8). Both work in service—Sam selling concessions on the ferry and Elena waiting tables at the golf club—and act as caretakers for their dying mother. Twenty-eight-year old Sam has been living in stasis for a decade, knowing the only way she and her sister will make it off the island is to sell their land, which they can’t contemplate while their mother is alive. Managing her medications and appointments is challenging enough. Throw in a pandemic that left Sam unemployed for two years, and the sisters are barely surviving. They’re collecting debts with the same speed they avoid answering calls from debt collectors.
Enter the bear, a literal animal, “thickly furred, gold and black and brown” (30), sitting outside their front door “fat and relaxed” (38).
The stakes are high, the conflict is clear, the 600-pound inciting incident is not at all subtle. On the surface, it seems like a simple story. But as Ron Charles points out in his Washington Post review, “It’s likely that every reader will project something different onto this hairy, polymorphic symbol.” Therein lies the slowly dissolving caramel: After finishing the novel, I turned the story around in my mind, wondering if I’d come to the right interpretation.
In my reading, the bear represents change. Elena takes to the animal, offering it food and seeking it out. She even speaks to it. Sam, meanwhile, recoils at its musky scent and yellow teeth. Elena appreciates the novelty the bear brings to her life. For her, change is revelatory: “[Elena] said [the bear] was magic—enchanted—a gift from the animal gods—She’d told Sam, leading up to this afternoon, that when she was with it, she felt strong and brave and also tiny and insignificant and utterly aware of her own body and dissolved into everything else in the universe” (151).
But Sam fears for her sister’s safety. Even if the bear doesn’t harm Elena, she risks a fine and jail time for feeding it. Change, for Sam, is fundamentally dangerous—ironic, considering all she’s wanted for the last decade is to uproot herself and leave behind everything she knows. Elena’s obsession threatens to undermine all of Sam’s dreams because for Sam, leaving is only possible together.
Charles suggests Bear is about “the cumulative stress of long-term nursing, the kind of crazy-making environment that develops when reading a loved one’s death even while pining for release from the prison of care.” Okay, sure.
Also: Bear is about the inescapable grief of growing up and away from a sister. No matter how close you are, no matter the inside jokes and secret languages you invent, no matter the hours you spend inventing games and worlds and happy endings, you and your sister are separate people. Miss you, I text my sister. Miss you, she tells me as we end a call. We use the word in the sense of “feeling the absence of,” but sometimes I think the sense of “failing to hit, reach, or contact” is more apt. Technology is great and all, but let’s face it: a text is always a failure when compared to spending time together.
The power of inside jokes: Here I am, singing my maid of honor speech at my sister’s wedding. I’m a terrible singer.
While reading Bear, I was also watching my own daughters navigate the necessary transition into separate selves. Some days, the older one is happy to spend two hours outside, waving sticks as the two of them pretend to be wizards. Other days, she has nothing more than an eye roll for her little sister, and the unpredictability feels like whiplash to the younger one. One sister thinks they should always be in tune. The other sister thinks they should pursue their own interests. Who is right?
Watching my daughters together makes me rethink everything about being an older sister!
Which brings me back to Bear. Who truly understands the bear, Sam or Elena? What happens when you are not believed by your sister, the person who, if Bear and Little Women are to be believed, is closest to you in the world? What are the consequences of enabling a sister’s obsession? Of asking her to shut out the world and live together in isolation? And when Sam comes face to face with the beast, which attitude toward change will protect Elena? For that matter, is protection possible? Can change be both threatening and transcendent at once?
Read Bear and let me know what you think. I’m sure the way you read your particular past into the sisters’ story will be different than mine—and no less true.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2024
Length: 282 pages; audiobook runs about 8 hours
Timeline: a season
Setting: San Juan Island (Pacific Northwest)
Narrator: close 3rd POV of Sam, the younger sister
Pairs Well With: Fairy tales, treks through the woods, “Every Breath You Take” by the Police (obsession!!)
Book Club
What do you think the bear represents? If it represents change, how would you react at the sight of it?
Elena, the older sister, keeps secrets from Sam. To what extent do you think she’s justified in doing so? Think about topics such as relationships, finances, and hopes for the future. Under what circumstances can (or should) these be kept private? Where would you draw the line between a secret and a lie?
Close Reading
Sam trusts no one except Elena, but she can’t seem to make Elena understand:
“If Elena were awake right now, Sam would kneel next to her and plead with her . . . She would say, Elena, we’re so close to what we’ve been waiting for, I know it’s been too long—years longer than we thought—and it’s been hard on you, all this responsibility, it’s too much. . . . We don’t need this animal. It’s not worth the risk. If you crave quick relief, get it elsewhere—eat candy or get drunk or drive fast. . . . Don’t do this. That’s what Sam would say.”
In this moment, the close third point-of-view shifts briefly into first, bringing us even deeper into Sam’s consciousness. Phillips manages this transition seamlessly by starting with the conditional tense: “If Elena were awake…” and “She would say…” This hypothetical language at first seems to signal wishful thinking.
But after the second conditional verb, Phillips slides the third-person “she” that refers to Sam into the first-person “I”: “We’re so close … I know it’s been too long…” In this section, it’s clear that Sam interprets the bear as a threat because she describes it in the terms of addiction. “[C]rave quick relief,” for instance, connotes getting high.
Right at this juncture, Phillips introduces the conditional tense again: “If you crave…” This echoes the earlier sentence, “If Elena were here…,” but of course “Elena” has been replaced by the second-person “you” because Sam is speaking directly to her (in her head). Bringing us back to the conditional tense is like Phillips’ bookending this brief first-person interlude. She ends the passage with Sam’s imperative statement to Elena (“Don’t do it”) followed by a direct, third-person statement that makes it clear this exchange has taken place only in Sam’s mind: “That’s what Sam would say.” Once again, it’s the conditional tense from a third-person perspective.
The effect of conditional third-person to present-tense first-person back to conditional third person has a neat, full-circle effect for the reader.
Creative Writing
Fiction: Tourists on the ferry continually see through Sam. She’s a worker, but not a person, to them. Think of a place you’ve visited. Now imagine you are a local there. Write about an afternoon from that person’s point-of-view. What do they notice the tourists doing? What annoys them about the visitors? How do they depend on tourism for their livelihood? How do they manage that tension between preserving and sharing their culture?
Nonfiction: Elena becomes obsessed with the bear. Sam, in her way, becomes obsessed with saving Elena from the bear. Write about your obsession, however dangerous or banal. How does it make you feel? How do people you love react to it? If your obsession is something concrete, like coffee, what abstract idea or emotion might it represent?
Sentence Study
After the sisters report the bear to authorities, a biologist from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife shows up. At first, Sam trusts Madeline Pettit and shows her around the property. As it becomes clear Madeline disapproves of Elena’s actions, Sam becomes defensive and resists Madeline’s advice. This passage captures their complicated dynamic:
“When Madeline gave directions, Sam was tempted, against her older sister’s guidance, to obey. That was the part that unnerved Sam, and intrigued her, and made her think about the biologist and write desperate emails and talk about her, apparently, too much.”
The verb “tempted” here suggests seduction or addiction. Similarly, the infinitive “to obey” indicates helplessness in the face of a greater power. Who is the enchanter here, the bear or Madeline Pettit? Sam is both called to and repulsed by Madeline because she represents the opposite of Elena: “against her older sister’s guidance.” The final sentence in this excerpt includes two examples of polysyndeton, which is when an author inserts “and” instead of commas between items in a list.
Visually, I picture the sentence like this:
