The Need

The Need (2019), a literary thriller by American novelist Helen Phillips, follows mother-of-two Molly as she becomes convinced that an intruder has invaded her home. Simultaneously a psychological thriller and an allegory for the anxieties of motherhood, The Need has been hailed as “one of this year’s most necessary novels” (The Guardian) and longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award. Phillips’s second novel follows up her acclaimed debut, The Beautiful Bureaucrat (a New York Times Notable Book in 2015).

The Need opens in Molly’s bedroom. Molly is “crouched in front of the mirror in the dark, clinging to them. The baby in her right arm, the child in her left.” She thinks she can hear “footsteps in the other room.” She is terrified that an intruder has entered her home. Four-year-old Viv and baby Ben don’t understand: “Her desperation for her children’s silence manifested as a suffocating force, the desire for a pillow, a thick pair of socks, anything she could shove into them to perfect their muteness and save their lives.”

Molly also has the nagging fear that she might be imagining this threat. She is sleep-deprived and, more than that, her perception has been off lately, strange: “This problem of hers had begun about four years ago, soon after Viv’s birth. She confessed it only to David, wanting to know if he ever experienced the same sensation, trying and failing to capture it in words: the minor disorientations that sometimes plagued her, the small errors of eyes and ears. The conviction that the rumble underfoot was due to an earthquake rather than a garbage truck. The conviction that there was something somehow off about a piece of litter found amid the fossils the Pit at work. A brief flash or dizziness that, for a millisecond, caused reality to shimmer or waver or disintegrate slightly.”



She is not sure of the cause, but she recognizes that her life is isolated, precarious. Her husband, David, a touring musician, is away a lot of the time. She works full-time and her only help with the kids is Erika, a twenty-three-year-old nanny whose life—“A Friday night beer with my girls”—seems increasingly “exotic” to Molly. Molly has no “girls,” no female friends or relatives to help and support her. She is alone.

The strangeness has also infiltrated her work life lately. A paleobiologist, Molly works at “the Pit,” a dig site whose fossils don’t quite resemble anything on record. Nor are the pieces of trash that turn up there quite right. Molly has found a Coke bottle whose label-font slants in the wrong direction, a toy soldier with a monkey’s tail and a Bible that uses the female pronoun for God.

Molly’s colleagues dismiss these findings as pranks, but Molly finds them fascinating. Off-hand, she mentions them to a tour group and soon finds herself embroiled in controversy over the “blasphemous” Bible. For Molly, this experience only compounds the guilt she already feels about working while her kids are at home with Erika.



Each time Molly convinces herself that she is imagining the intruder, something startles her again. Viv screams in another room; she catches sight of something in the corner of her eye. Molly is searching for a weapon when the lid of a toy chest rises up and a deer-head mask emerges (made by David as a birthday present for Molly). The mask is worn by a figure dressed all in black, apparently a “small, slim man.” The figure communicates in writing that if Molly doesn’t meet him later outside the house she’ll regret it forever. Therefore, after the kids are asleep, Molly goes out to meet the intruder, who removes the mask: “She found herself face to face with herself. The same uneven eyebrows and recently emerged wrinkles on the forehead…the angle of the nose; the placement of the mole on the cheek…She stared at her self and her self stared at her.”

This doppelganger calls herself “Moll.” She is Molly’s other self, the self who never had children, the self whom Molly sometimes guiltily imagines and resents. However, Moll is grieving for her loss. She wants to share Molly’s kids. She argues that she is entitled to this, it’s hers to reclaim. Molly pities Moll, but is horrified by the claim.

Slowly, Molly accommodates the presence of Moll, sometimes fearing her, sometimes pitying her, sometimes trying to push her away. Finally, she begins to contemplate Moll’s destruction. The ending is ambiguous: “She sat in the parked car in the uncomfortable heat, immobilized by the what-ifs, the swiftness with which anything can change, the ever-present split second that is the difference between blood spilling or not, the difference between one future and another.”