Eileen characters

Appears from the start

A twenty-four-year-old clerk at a boys' correctional facility in Massachusetts, looking back decades later on the week that ended her old life. Eileen lives with her alcoholic father, neglects herself, steals small things, and fills her private life with harsh fantasies and plans of escape. Her account is candid about how isolated, angry, and unreliable she was at the time.

Appears from the start

Eileen's widowed father, a retired police officer whose drinking has made their house unsafe and squalid. He is suspicious, insulting, and prone to waving his old service weapon at imagined threats, leaving Eileen to manage both his needs and the danger he creates.

Appears from the start

Eileen's older sister, who has already left the family home. Eileen measures herself against Joanie's conventional attractiveness and relative freedom, while also resenting that the daily burden of their father has been left behind for her.

Appears from the start

Eileen's late mother, remembered through a household shaped by illness, disappointment, and emotional distance. Eileen's recollections of her help explain the family's long habits of shame and neglect.

Appears from the start

A guard at Moorehead whom Eileen watches obsessively from a distance. She knows little about him, but turns his ordinary presence into an elaborate private romance and imagines that he might provide a way into another life.

First appears in chapter 2

A boy confined at Moorehead after the death of his father. Quiet and troubled, he becomes the focus of the institution's new psychologist, whose interest in the reasons behind his crime goes beyond the prison's routine treatment of him.

First appears in chapter 4

Moorehead's poised and fashionable new psychologist. Educated, self-assured, and attentive to Eileen in a way no one else is, Rebecca quickly becomes the object of Eileen's admiration. Her curiosity about Lee Polk's case and her apparent friendship give Eileen an intoxicating sense that change is possible.

First appears in chapter 8

Lee Polk's mother. When Eileen encounters her at home, Mrs. Polk is frightened, restrained, and caught in Rebecca's attempt to force the Polk family's hidden history into the open.

First appears in chapter 8

Lee Polk's dead father, whose killing led to Lee's confinement at Moorehead. What happened inside the Polk household becomes the central question behind Rebecca's interest in the boy and his mother.