Severance

Candace is a 20-something woman, a first-generation immigrant from China who works in Manhattan as a Senior Product Coordinator for publishing company Spectra. Candace is quiet and passive, an outsider living a detached life. As a child, she was close to her mother Ruifang, but after her father moved the family to America, their relationship suffered, as Ruifang forced Candace to downplay her Chinese identity. By the time the novel starts Candace is orphaned, having lost her father to a car accident and her mother to early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Candace has few friends and no living family in America. In the absence of these relationships, she is adrift in her adult life. She is reserved and selfish by necessity, a survival mechanism that keeps her from acknowledging the hurt caused by her past. She stockpiles material objects, which serve as both tools to soothe her and conduits for memories of her family. Her memories are just as much a part of her life as the present, peppering the novel with vignettes from her young-adult life in New York and her childhood in China. Her constant recollections keep her trapped with one foot in the past, like a