The New Couple in 5B

Rosie Lowan is the protagonist of The New Couple in 5B. She is a true crime writer and the wife of Chad Lowan. She is described as having “wild dark hair” and a “resting worried face” (22): “[W]hen left to its own devices, my brow wrinkles; the corners of my mouth turn down” (22). She struggles to differentiate her perceptions from reality, stemming from her traumatic childhood in which she was raised by a family of “tricksters, frauds, con artists” (98). At the beginning of the novel, Rosie has “been estranged from [her] family for over a decade” after “fleeing abuse, chaos, madness” in the small Ozarks town where she was raised (15, 39). Her parents spend their lives “preying on the most vulnerable” in their community by pretending to be healers and fortune tellers (98). As a result, she struggles to distinguish her “visual hallucinations” from reality. For most of the novel, she rejects these visions, accepting her psychologist’s explanation that they are a “manifestation of trauma” (226). After her visions of Willa save her life, Rosie finally comes to accept that “there’s more in heaven and earth” than she can explain away with logic (359).