PositiveMusic and LiteratureLange portrays the narrator of People in the Room as a precocious teenager whose acuity of perception makes her feel like an interloper in her own home. We come to know the novel’s narrator-protagonist as someone whose burning desire to tell a story is at odds with her crippling awareness of the limitations posed by her lack of experience, as a sheltered seventeen-year-old surrounded by a happy family. Whose stories and whose secrets does a girl hear age have a right to? In her encounters with the three mysterious women, Lange’s protagonist wants to lash out against them, to declare (as she imagines someone declaring to her, perhaps), \'You don’t deserve to keep secrets.\' At the same time, part of the reason these women fascinate her so much is that somehow, she says, \'deep inside I knew that they alone had the right to speak of death, of ill-timed affairs, of suicides, of bitter loneliness.\'
