What to Say Next

Kit is one of the narrators and protagonists of What to Say Next. At the beginning of the novel, Kit feels lost in grief after her father died in a car accident. She compares the emotional distance that she feels from her peers to wearing an “astronaut helmet” that prevents her from fully engaging with school, her friends, or her mother, Mandip. She initially pursues a friendship with David because his social isolation leads her to understand that he will allow her space to be quiet when she needs it.

Kit struggles to sleep as a symptom of her grief, which is exacerbated by the revelation, late in the book, that she was driving the night her father died. Though Kit was not at fault for the accident, she still deals with guilt, both that she survived when her father didn’t and because she worries over how she might have prevented the accident. When David shows that there is no version of the accident where Kit could have responded and saved her father, Kit does not feel that this resolves her grief, though she does feel some level of reassurance from the knowledge.

Kit spends much of the novel feeling torn between what she terms the “old Kit” and the “new Kit.