56 pages • 1 hour read
Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute
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Themes
The Reality of Neurodivergence and Chronic Illness
Content Warning: This guide references parental abandonment and details mental health conditions, specifically obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute does not look at mental illness, neurodivergence, or chronic illness with rose-colored glasses; Hibbert’s book, influenced by her own experience with OCD, autism, and chronic pain, explores the wide variation in the way these diagnoses can affect the lives of those who experience these conditions. Hibbert includes a number of individuals with characteristics of neurodivergence or chronic illness, avoiding tokenizing differences and normalizing the prevalence of such conditions.
In Highly Suspicious, Brad regularly deals with the negative repercussions or costs of his OCD. Hibbert uses Brad’s reality of OCD to combat misconceptions in stories and media concerning the condition—often, the illness OCD is used as a term to loosely describe characters who prioritize cleanliness or who have particular pet peeves. Brad’s OCD, on the other hand, is true to the reality of many who suffer from this debilitating condition. Because part of his obsessions have to do with clean spaces, living without a roommate during his university years is not merely a matter of preference or privilege; the chance (and the money) to live alone will have significant impact on his mental health, as it will allow him to trust that his space is clean to his own specifications. He also becomes unreasonably distressed over Celine’s injury, dealing with intrusive and upsetting thoughts that consume him in the early parts of the book. Brad is insecure of the ways in which his OCD impairs his behavior or makes him seem a certain way, as Celine’s insult to his OCD was a major part of the rift created years ago between these two former friends.
As Celine grows closer to Brad once more, she learns that he does not possess the easy confidence that he projects in recent years, an understanding that is paralleled to her increased understanding that Brad’s OCD offers him skills, even as it makes his life more challenging. At the midway meeting between BEP excursions, Celine is given the lowest score on creative thinking; Katharine urges her to examine her assumptions. Brad, by contrast, continually questions nearly everything he perceives. Part of this is a result of the intrusive thoughts that result from his OCD, while part is a skill developed specifically to manage those intrusive thoughts. When driving home one night he thinks, “My brain points out that we could be speeding off a bridge right now […] but I remind my brain that there are no bridges on my route home because I do not, funnily enough, live in Venice” (257). Brad’s success in finding the Golden Compasses is something that Celine recognizes because of his attention to detail—another skill motivated in part by his OCD—and Brad’s receipt of the scholarship at the end of the novel suggests that the world at large may come to see the value of his skills, too. Brad must examine his assumptions, as the assumptions his brain makes are not always trustworthy. What begins as necessity becomes skill, aided by his neurodiversity.
Hibbert also introduces this theme when Aurora, who has Celiac disease, cites the lesson she learned by being thought “a complete freak” in the time before her illness was diagnosed and managed (134). She argues that the experience of being bullied by some of her peers led her to learn that the friends she now has are “worth more than all the people who [were] casually cruel to [her,] because they’re deliberately kind and the makes them better people” (134). By contrast, she frames the easy life she and Celine assume Brad to have experienced as a lost opportunity to learn such a lesson.
The novel offers an optimistic vision in which differences such as neurodivergence and chronic illness are better understood and normalized in the general public. Hibbert humanizing Brad, a primary character with OCD, encourages the reader to normalize such conditions instead of stigmatizing them. Aurora’s admission of her Celiac disease partway through the book additionally suggests that underlying conditions exist in many people, and it is important to treat everyone with kindness and acceptance instead of making assumptions or passing judgment. Brad and Aurora are not defined by their conditions but instead are depicted as fully developed characters worthy of emotional depth and a life outside of their perceived limitations.
The Effects of Parental Abandonment
Hibbert explores parental abandonment through the character of Celine, not only acknowledging its effects but also normalizing the trauma that many carry due to this type of abandonment. As with mentions of neurodivergence and chronic illness in the novel, Celine fights to not be defined by or overwhelmed by her experience with her father. Celine, a main character in the novel, brings awareness and depth to an issue that plagues many young people in the real world.
In the first chapters of the novel, Celine insists that she doesn’t care about her long-absent father, who left Celine, her sister Giselle, and their mother, Neneh, when Celine was seven years old. He spent the 10 years prior to the events of the novel living with his “new family”: his wife, with whom he was unfaithful to Neneh, and their twin daughters, whose birth precipitated his abandonment. However, as the novel progresses, Celine discovers that she may actually be more affected by her father’s abandonment than she originally thought. While she wishes to not care about him, she comes to realize that his departure has greatly impacted her life.
Over the course of the novel, Celine increasingly comes to acknowledge her trauma due to her father’s abandonment. Hibbert frames this work of self-discovery as partially accomplished prior to the novel’s beginning—at various points, Celine recognizes certain negative qualities in herself that used to be more acute when she was younger—and partially as being worked upon as the narrative progresses. This allows Hibbert to frame Celine within a certain space of older adolescence. While Celine is still a teenager, and still has growth to accomplish before she reaches adulthood, the work she has already performed on herself shows that she is on the precipice of this adulthood. Celine is mature and competent, and she still has room to grow.
For Celine, beginning to heal this hurt requires admitting the hurt is there in the first place; no matter how she wishes to disavow it, her father has influenced her life. In an ironic twist, however, admitting this allows Celine to lessen the ways she allows anger and resentment toward her father to affect her going forward. Once she admits that she has been organizing her life in an attempt to make her father ashamed of abandoning her family, she can recognize that this plan is misguided (in that it leads her to live her life for her father’s sake, rather than her own) and likely to be ineffectual, as she cannot control the feeling or actions of others. Giving herself the chance to feel these feelings, rather than shoving them away, offers Celine the opportunity to begin to work through the emotional scar left by her father’s betrayal.
The end of the novel is optimistic about Celine’s future emotional health. While her plans to seek therapy and proactively handle her family trauma suggest that she will not ever entirely separate herself from the events of her childhood, the fact that she is able to focus on her and Brad’s achievements at the Explorer’s Ball (as opposed to fretting over her father’s presence, which is neither confirmed nor denied in the novel’s final pages) indicates that these events will no longer be a defining aspect of her personality.
Internal Feelings Versus External Presentation
Hibbert examines many ways in which someone’s internalized emotions clash or coincide with their external presentation, creating nuanced characters who represent the complexity of young adulthood. As a person with OCD, Brad worries frequently about different potential outcomes to events, some of which are reasonable and some of which are highly unlikely but seem reasonable due to the intrusive thoughts that come with his condition. He works hard to maintain a cool outer facade, keeping up his persona as a laid-back athlete, only letting few close confidants (such as his best friend, Jordan) know the true state of his mental health. Celine, meanwhile, really is as confident as she seems, so much so that she is entirely shocked to learn that others aren’t like her—that they internalize the cruelty of others and allow it to damage their own self-worth. While her confidence is usually an asset that protects her from the unkindness of her schoolmates, it also works to her detriment when it comes to understanding others. Celine, whose external presentation matches her internal life, cannot imagine that Brad experiences the self-doubt that plagues him.
This discrepancy between the way one feels and the way one acts (or, in Celine’s case, the consistency between these two modes) operates thematically on several levels within the novel’s framework as a YA romance. Misunderstandings and misreadings of the other protagonist are a common convention within the enemies-to-lovers trope. Having characters view one another uncharitably allows for them to maintain their virulent dislike (like the longstanding feud between Brad and Celine) without framing either of the characters are irredeemable. Each character must have a reason to be enemies, but they also must find a reason to come back together; misreading intent creates this space within the trope. In Brad and Celine’s case, Celine assumes that Brad callously rejected her friendship out of a shallow desire for popularity. Over the course of the novel, she comes to understand that Brad’s actions were underscored by intense anxiety about making friends and self-doubt that he is capable of doing so. It was, in effect, not about Celine at all.
Couching this discrepancy within the novel’s exploration of self-discovery (particularly in an emotional sense), allows Hibbert to frame misunderstandings also as a normal part of adolescence. Brad and Celine don’t always match their inner selves to their outer selves, largely in part because they do not yet fully know who those inner selves are. While this remains true of adults, as well, this process of self-discovery is particularly intense during adolescence. Even Celine, whose confidence carries her through numerous struggles, must learn to access her emotions instead of shoving them away and must learn how to let those emotions become apparent to others, as well. The novel’s ending, in which Celine feels secure enough to publicly discuss her love for Brad, suggests an optimistic horizon for the internal growth of both characters.
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