Reflexivity

What's interesting about the story is that the women all expect their gifts to somehow protect them from ... something. Maybe it isn't that they're afraid, actually, but that the gift seems so sure and steady that they believe it will guide them into making all the right decisions. Which I guess are decisions without consequences? Hard to say. We don't have much motive from the author, only the characters' experiences.

This is the 'true to life' part, I think. What Annmarie recently described as "the universal value...the difference between a scream and giving form and rhythm to a scream so that your scream can become anybody else's scream..."

Each of the main characters has to make choices, in-the-moment, that have ramifications for the future whether or not they're aware of this temporal fact. Many of their choices, we infer, are predicated upon past experience - the link back. A lot of the choices seem, in retrospect, to not have been so well-considered? And yet, ultimately, these characters find that their impulse to love does lead them eventually to someone who can meet them where they are and participate in creating a mutual happiness.