Andrew Bloom (Lily's Father)

Andrew Bloom is Lily's late father, a respected alderman in Plover, Iowa, who chronically abused his wife Jenny throughout their marriage. He dies before the novel's present-day timeline begins, so he never appears directly on the page — readers know him entirely through Lily's journal entries, a rooftop confession, and fragmented childhood memories. His polished civic image concealed the violence he inflicted at home, and his legacy drives the novel's central dramatic irony.

Andrew's relationship with Lily is the engine of the novel — complex, painful, and unresolved. Lily cannot mourn him cleanly or hate him cleanly; her grief is real but tainted by the contempt she felt watching him abuse her mother. She delivers a hollow eulogy at his funeral while privately loathing him, and her fierce vow never to accept violence in a relationship is forged entirely in reaction to who he was as a father.

Andrew subjected Jenny to repeated domestic violence throughout their entire marriage. He hid the abuse behind a respectable public persona as a community alderman, leaving Jenny to endure it without outside scrutiny or intervention. Jenny's choice to stay became the painful template Lily both judged harshly and, by the novel's end, came to understand with deeper empathy — recognising the architecture of the trap her mother was caught in.

Andrew's funeral in Boston is the novel's inciting event and the indirect catalyst for Lily and Ryle's first meeting. Directly after the service, Lily retreats to a rooftop and unloads her contempt for her father onto Ryle, a total stranger. With devastating irony, the man she meets in the raw aftermath of grieving her abusive father turns out to mirror that father — making Andrew's death the structural hinge on which the entire plot turns.

The most shattering memory is the single time Lily physically placed herself between her parents during one of Andrew's assaults. Recorded in a journal entry addressed to Ellen DeGeneres, the memory captures the helplessness she felt — the realisation that a child's body between two adults changes nothing. That moment of failed intervention clarifies why Lily's vow to never accept violence feels so deeply personal and urgent.

No — Andrew dies before the novel begins and faces no accountability whatsoever. Hoover deliberately withholds any backstory, remorse, or explanation for his violence, a narrative choice that refuses to humanise him. His death actually deepens Lily's wound rather than healing it, because she is denied even the possibility of confrontation. The community's respectful eulogy for him underscores how completely his public persona shielded him from consequence.

Andrew's marriage to Jenny becomes the unconscious template against which Lily measures her own relationship with Ryle. Lily began the novel contemptuous of her mother for staying, having sworn she would never do the same — yet as Ryle's behaviour escalates, she finds herself inside the very pattern she vowed to escape. Andrew's ghost functions as the novel's constant measuring stick: every act of Ryle's violence is implicitly weighed against the childhood violence Lily witnessed, making the two men the novel's central parallel.

Atlas witnessed the reality of Andrew's household during his time living near the Blooms in Lily's adolescence, giving him an intimate understanding of the danger she lived with daily. Their bond was forged partly in shared knowledge of that violence, making Atlas Lily's emotional counterweight to everything Andrew represented. He became her refuge precisely because her home life — shaped entirely by Andrew's abuse — was so unsafe.