The Interestings Chapter 15 Summary

How It All Goes Down

  • Jules, Dennis, and Rory move a short ways north and buy a better apartment; they instantly feel saved even though Dennis's depression is still around.
  • Ash comes over and helps them unpack.
  • After Rory goes to bed, Ash talks about Mo's progress and it's one of the few times we really feel for her—she doesn't know who Mo will become because there are so many avenues closed off to him now.
  • Jules thinks that even Rory, who won't have a wealthy life, will have it easier because she is happy with herself.
  • That same night, after Ash goes home, Betsy Wolf wakes up with a bleed to the brain and dies instantly.
  • Ash calls Jules because Ethan is in Hong Kong, and Jules goes over to her place right away.
  • Jules has the strange experience of walking into the Labyrinth again after all those years—suddenly everything seems shabby and frayed without Betsy around.
  • Gil Wolf appears and the guy looks really lost. Ouch.
  • Ash goes off to her room to call Goodman and share the news.
  • The funeral is a couple days later, after Ethan flies back; Jules's mom asks to come, which Jules is weirdly irritable about.
  • Jules tries to say some words about what the Wolf family meant to her but can't because her mother is in the room.
  • Larkin reads a poem about her grandmother but can barely get through it, and Jules thinks about how Goodman missed his beloved dog's death and his mother's.
  • Ethan drops everything from his schedule to be with Ash, because that's kind of his thing.
  • Mo doesn't make it through the funeral and runs out the door.
  • Jules takes her mother home and thinks about how frail her own mother looks; when she wakes up the next morning, she is shocked to think about Ash's mother.
  • The phone rings while Dennis is making breakfast and Jules answers.
  • Goodman is on the phone because he can't call Ash while Ethan is staying so close to her—he asks about the funeral and then abruptly starts to cry.
  • Jules cries, too, and then waits it out until he's done.
  • She asks if he has someone to talk to there and he turns it into a weird conversation about how she liked him, so Jules hangs up on him.
  • Their lives all move on and Ethan experiences a massive failure when he tries to make an animated film about child labor.
  • He tries to take some time off and be with his family, but dude still can't deal with Mo's disability.
  • Larkin, too, is a constant reminder of how far he has moved from what he actually liked, which was the drawing part of animation.
  • Ash continues to have minor success as a director.
  • Jules has been losing patients as their insurance runs out or they simply stop coming, and Dennis spends his time with Rory and reading up on the latest in sonography.
  • One day, they go to dinner with Ash and Ethan and another couple they don't like.
  • This couple happens to mention a friend of theirs who tried a completely new antidepressant that's still in clinical trials and came back from a deep depression; Jules is interested and asks Ethan to pulls strings to get Dennis into the trial.
  • Dennis experiences life as it unfolds out of depression.
  • One night he wakes up and feels like having sex, which hasn't happened in a long time.
  • They have to rediscover sex with each other, and Dennis ends up accidentally hurting Jules a few times.
  • Dennis manages to find a job again.
  • Jules stops envying Ash and Ethan so much because she's just grateful Dennis gets out of bed in the morning now.
  • Life moves on and Jules worries about Rory getting into decent schools because she's more of an outdoorsy kind of person.
  • Historical moment alert: We hit 2001 and the World Trade Center is destroyed; Jules's clients often call her in a panic and she helps them deal with the anger.
  • One night, Jules sees Cathy on television and calls Jonah.
  • Turns out Cathy became the CEO of a major financial firm that lost almost five hundred employees in the terrorist attack.
  • She promises not to cut off the paychecks or health insurance of the dead so their families stay alive.
  • The public is angry, though, because it's taking too much time for that to happen and Cathy apologizes to each person who calls in.
  • Jules makes the connection between how they dropped Cathy and how she must feel now.
  • Jonah asks Jules what she thinks really happened between Goodman and Cathy, and though Jules deflects, she admits she still thinks about it.