Situational irony - Noel lost a friend
The sudden distancing of Noel from her confuses and devastates Ruby. She is not sure if he’s her real live boyfriend anymore. He doesn’t answer her calls nor makes an effort to talk to her. They break up when Noel returns from New York. The situational irony in the novel happens when it’s revealed that Noel lost a dear friend in a tragic accident - to which he was a direct witness. He wasn’t distant from Ruby because he stopped caring but, because he was dealing with this loss.
The story of gay penguins
Nora comes to Ruby’s grandmother’s funeral despite their cold relationship. Nora got angry at her when she started dating Noel, whom Nora had a crush on. To indirectly confront her, Nora tells her a story about a gay penguin couple, who desperately wanted a baby, so they kept stealing eggs from other penguins. They were eventually given an abandoned egg to take care of. They were desperate for an offspring, but it still doesn’t justify what they did. Nora uses this to tell Ruby that what she’d done to her, knowing that she liked Noel first, was not a right thing to do, despite desperately wanting it. It is an ironic comparison because it promotes a toxic culture of having a claim on someone just because you like them.
What makes someone a boyfriend
The main takeaway from the novel is the idea surrounding the meaning of a term boyfriend. Ruby categorizes types of boyfriends into several archetypes, the main and worth looking for being the real live boyfriend. Other concepts of boyfriend she mentions are those who are distant, those who aren’t really there. The irony lies in the fact that there are categories of boyfriends at all. Ruby’s category of a real live boyfriend is the only one who can be called a boyfriend in the first place.
Toxic mother
Ruby’s relationship with her mother is complicated, and it only gets worse when Ruby calls her out on her toxic behavior. That behavior includes forcing her ideas and sudden changes in her diet onto her family, and taking her husband for granted. Ruby refuses to apologize for saying that her mother bosses her father around, which escalates in her mother completely disrespecting and disregarding her as a person, i.e. forcing Ruby to eat meat when she is a vegetarian. The novel concludes this behavior of her mother as her being “quirky” and herself, but in reality, can be seen as very toxic and abusive.
