The Line Tender

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the death of a parent and the death of a child.

The Line Tender contrasts characters who isolate themselves after a loss with characters who share their grief with others. In this way, the author shows that being part of a community is essential to a healthy grieving process. At the start of the novel, Lucy, Sookie, and Lucy’s father, Tom, are disconnected from one another, not sharing their feelings about Lucy’s mother’s death. When Sookie catches the first great white shark, he doesn’t call a biologist, even at Fred’s insistence, because it would remind him too much of Lucy’s mother. Also, both Lucy and Tom hide their emotional reactions to the shark from one another, claiming that their red faces are just due to the July heat. That night, instead of discussing the shark and the memories it brings up of his wife, Tom leaves Lucy alone in the house to go scuba diving in a storm. While all three characters are still grieving Lucy’s mother’s death, they don’t share their grief with each other and are therefore unable to move forward. As Lucy explains, “when [her] mom collapsed on the boat, things stopped happening in the usual way” (91).