Jenny Bloom (Lily's Mother)

Jenny Bloom is Lily's mother, a secondary character whose emotional absence shapes Lily's entire backstory. Though she appears sparingly—primarily in Lily's journal reflections and at Andrew's funeral—her impact is significant. Hoover portrays her not as a villain but as a deeply conditioned victim of domestic violence whose repeated silence made her an inadvertent enabler of Andrew's abuse.

Jenny delivers a tearful, reverent eulogy that idealizes Andrew and omits any acknowledgment of the abuse he inflicted on Lily. For Lily, this is a second wound on top of complicated grief—confirmation that her suffering will never be witnessed or validated by the one person who had the closest view of it. The scene crystallizes Lily's lifelong sense of invisibility within her own family.

Jenny stays because decades of psychological conditioning have eroded her ability to name Andrew's behavior as abuse or to see leaving as a real option. Hoover frames this not as stupidity or indifference but as the product of systematic emotional erosion that normalizes violence and equates departure with failure. Her love for Lily is genuine; it simply operates within limits she never finds the courage to cross.

Jenny functions as the cautionary mirror Lily refuses to walk into. The moment Lily recognizes in herself the same rationalizations her mother made—minimizing, forgiving, staying—she understands that remaining with Ryle would mean becoming Jenny. That fear of replicating her mother's silent complicity drives Lily to end her marriage.

Because Jenny is emotionally unavailable as a confidante, Lily redirects her most honest self-reflection into journal entries addressed to Ellen DeGeneres, who becomes the surrogate audience Jenny never managed to be. Hoover uses this narrative device structurally: Jenny's silence within the family home is mirrored by her absence from Lily's most private inner life.

No—Hoover deliberately withholds a villainous framing from Jenny. She is portrayed as a genuine victim of the same cycles of domestic violence the novel examines, a good-hearted person whose love for Lily is real but fatally outweighed by fear and denial. Hoover suggests she is, in some ways, harder to process than a straightforward antagonist precisely because her harm comes entirely from omission rather than malice.

Jenny's choices set the negative template that Lily is determined to rewrite for Emmy. Lily's decision to leave Ryle and raise Emmy outside the abusive marriage is, at its core, a refusal to hand her daughter the same silent, complicit script Jenny handed her. Hoover implies that breaking the generational cycle requires this kind of conscious, painful departure from inherited patterns.

Jenny spent decades as Andrew's wife constructing and maintaining an internal narrative that minimized or excused his abusive behavior. The funeral eulogy makes that narrative visible in its most extreme form: even standing at his grave, she cannot stop performing it. Hoover uses the scene to show that Jenny is both Andrew's victim—shaped by years of his abuse—and, by virtue of her adult choices and proximity, an enabler whose silence allowed that abuse to persist.