City People by Elizabeth Topp Summary, Characters and Themes
City People by Elizabeth Topp is a sharp, emotionally layered novel set in contemporary Manhattan. It explores the invisible burdens of modern motherhood, ambition, and identity.
The story revolves around a group of women connected through a prestigious preschool, whose lives are shaken by the sudden suicide of Susan Harris—a brilliant psychologist and fellow mother. Topp examines themes of status, performance, connection, and mental health through alternating perspectives. Each chapter spotlights a different woman, revealing the pressures behind their curated lives.
Summary
The novel opens on a stark note: a woman stands on her Manhattan rooftop, quietly resolved to end her life. This unnamed woman is later revealed as Susan Harris, a successful psychologist, wife, and mother.
Her death sends shockwaves through her social circle, particularly among parents at the elite Woodmont preschool.
Vic, a single mother and struggling writer, receives the news while touring another prestigious school. She recalls Susan’s curated perfection—her wellness routines, tidy apartment, and intellectual charisma.
Vic begins questioning what signs she might have missed. Her guilt grows, especially as she confronts her creative block and financial stress.
Bhavna, another mother in the group, is driven and status-conscious. Susan’s death coincides with her husband losing his job, threatening the lifestyle she’s worked hard to build.
At work, she fends off sabotage from a colleague while trying to hold her family together. She also aims to preserve their chances at private school admission.
Kara, a stay-at-home mom with a quiet life, becomes fixated on Susan’s final days. Living across the street, she watches the building obsessively, convinced there’s more to the story.
Her suspicion of Susan’s husband Michael deepens. Kara logs observations and patterns, linking them to unresolved trauma from her sister’s suicide.
Chandice, a former lawyer turned full-time parent, reflects on Susan’s passing through the lens of race, grief, and the pressure to maintain composure in elite spaces. She struggles to find where she fits in a world that expects Black women to be both graceful and unshakable.
Amy, a wealthy hedge fund manager and single mom, is shaken by the news in a different way. She sees in Susan a mirror—another high-achieving, emotionally guarded woman.
Amy begins combing through Susan’s research. She suspects Susan may have written about her own suicidal ideation through academic case studies.
Penelope, a polished leader in the parent community, reacts with discomfort rather than grief. She’s more concerned with managing the social fallout and ensuring appearances remain intact.
Over time, Penelope starts to question the emptiness of her carefully managed relationships. She begins to feel the weight of unspoken emotion and the limits of her social performance.
As the story progresses, each woman’s life is subtly transformed by Susan’s death. Vic tries to turn her reflections into a novel but wonders if she’s honoring or exploiting her friend.
Bhavna debates sacrificing her ethics to protect her social standing. Kara’s obsession consumes her, straining her marriage.
Chandice seeks solidarity and emotional truth in a community where both are rare. Amy continues to dig through Susan’s writings, uncovering what may be her cry for help disguised as scholarship.
Tensions rise when the group attends Susan’s memorial service. It feels more performative than personal.
Michael’s cold demeanor stands out to many. Some, like Kara and Penelope, grow increasingly uneasy, suspecting he may be hiding something.
Still, the real focus of the novel is not on whether foul play occurred. Instead, it highlights how women silently carry unbearable weight and the systems that discourage vulnerability.
The novel concludes with an epilogue from Susan’s perspective. In a letter written weeks before her death, she outlines her overwhelming sense of invisibility, grief, and pressure.
Despite outward appearances, she felt disconnected from everyone around her. She expresses regret—not only for dying but for how much of her life was lived unseen.
Her voice, at last unfiltered, gives depth and tragic clarity to everything that came before.
By the end, City People reveals the fragile scaffolding behind polished lives. It urges readers to question how well we really know those we pass every day—and what it might take to truly see them.
Characters
Susan Harris
Susan Harris is the tragic figure whose death reverberates through the novel, forcing the surrounding women to confront their own illusions, vulnerabilities, and ambitions. A respected psychologist and mother, Susan maintained an outward appearance of poise and control.
Her social media projected wellness retreats, clean eating, and conscious parenting. Yet internally, she suffered from deep-seated despair and disconnection, which culminated in her suicide.
Her life and death expose the brutal chasm between public performance and private suffering. In the epilogue, Susan’s voice reveals a woman who felt invisible in her pain, burdened by societal expectations and silently studying the very phenomena—maternal burnout and mental collapse—that ultimately claimed her.
Her character functions not only as a mystery to be unraveled but also as a mirror for every other character’s suppressed fears and desires.
Vic
Vic is one of the most emotionally resonant characters in the novel—a struggling writer and single mother navigating both personal grief and social alienation. Intelligent but insecure, she straddles two worlds.
She is academically accomplished and socially aware, yet financially and emotionally strained. Susan’s death deeply unsettles her, not just because of their past connection but because it forces Vic to examine the boundaries of her own mental endurance.
She is haunted by what she missed, what she might have done, and whether she herself is also on a path toward collapse. Her journey toward understanding Susan becomes entangled with her creative process.
This culminates in an attempt to write a novel based on Susan’s life. Vic’s character becomes a vehicle for the reader’s moral and emotional engagement with the story—someone who constantly interrogates what it means to live authentically while barely holding it all together.
Bhavna
Bhavna represents the striving professional woman—ambitious, image-conscious, and desperate to climb the social ladder for the sake of her family’s future. She is razor-sharp and hyper-aware of how power operates in both the corporate world and parenting circles.
The loss of Susan, paired with her husband Dev’s job loss, destabilizes the framework she’s constructed to protect her family from precarity. While she is often judgmental—especially of Vic’s lack of polish—Bhavna is not without vulnerability.
Her anxiety stems from a real fear of slipping through the cracks, of losing status and security. She is torn between ambition and integrity.
Repeatedly, she is pushed to consider whether survival in elite spaces requires betrayal of self. Her evolution is less about grief and more about recalibrating ambition in the face of social and economic uncertainty.
Kara
Kara is an obsessive, watchful character whose response to Susan’s death quickly shifts from concern to fixation. Her proximity to Susan’s building and prior glimpses into Susan’s private life fuel a paranoia that something nefarious occurred.
Kara’s compulsive surveillance—of Michael, the nanny Isa, and building dynamics—is not purely voyeuristic; it is also deeply personal. The death triggers unresolved trauma related to her sister’s suicide, and Kara begins to unravel emotionally.
Her frantic attempts to piece together the truth reflect both a refusal to accept the randomness of tragedy and a desperate need to impose order on chaos. Her storyline is not just about Susan—it is about how grief and guilt can manifest as obsession when left unprocessed.
Chandice
Chandice is measured, composed, and fiercely intelligent. A former corporate lawyer who stepped back to focus on motherhood, she navigates the elite social setting with an awareness sharpened by her race and professional history.
As a Black woman in predominantly white elite spaces, Chandice understands the politics of belonging better than most. She presents strength and stability, but Susan’s death stirs buried emotions—particularly about the societal pressures to perform strength at the expense of mental health.
Her quiet transformation throughout the novel involves a shift toward genuine vulnerability. She begins to loosen her self-imposed rigidity and open herself to community, particularly through unexpected bonds with Vic and Amy.
Chandice’s story interrogates the costs of emotional containment and the challenge of redefining success beyond traditional metrics.
Amy
Amy is a highly successful hedge fund manager and single mother who prides herself on emotional discipline, discretion, and total control over her image and circumstances. She is enigmatic and emotionally withheld, but Susan’s death pierces her carefully guarded shell.
For Amy, Susan represents a kindred spirit—another intelligent, high-functioning single mother whose internal agony went undetected. This realization unmoors Amy and prompts a deeper introspection about her own emotional life.
She reflects on her need for solitude, her estrangement from authentic connection, and the ways in which she keeps her daughter Pearl at a guarded distance. As she delves into Susan’s academic work, Amy begins to see the risks of her own stoicism.
She contemplates the price of silence in high-achieving women’s lives. Her arc culminates in a rare moment of candor during a school event, where she dares to advocate for emotional well-being—a radical act for someone who once considered vulnerability a liability.
Penelope
Penelope is the archetype of the polished, socially dominant stay-at-home mom. She wields influence through her role in the Parents’ Association and is adept at maintaining appearances, crafting narratives, and upholding the unwritten codes of elite motherhood.
Initially, she sees Susan’s suicide as a disturbing inconvenience—something to be managed rather than mourned. But over time, cracks begin to show.
She confronts the emptiness of her relationships and the toll of constant self-curation. Though her transformation is subtle, Penelope begins to ask harder questions about the life she’s built around performance and control.
Her unease around Michael and her awkward attempts at offering comfort reveal a deeper disturbance. It is the creeping suspicion that the social world she dominates may be fundamentally devoid of substance.
Penelope’s journey is one of slow disillusionment, marked by a reluctant confrontation with her own suppressed emotions.
Michael (Susan’s Husband)
Though not a viewpoint character, Michael looms large in the background of the narrative. He is emotionally opaque, polite to the point of being eerie, and seemingly unfazed by Susan’s death.
His coldness and evasiveness disturb nearly every character who interacts with him, fueling speculation about what he might be hiding. While there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, his behavior becomes a Rorschach test.
Each woman projects onto him her own theories about male aloofness, complicity, or emotional neglect. Michael’s role underscores one of the novel’s central themes.
It is the idea that men are often excused from the emotional labor that women are forced to perform. That asymmetry contributes to the isolation women like Susan experience.
Themes
The Illusion of Perfection
One of the most haunting themes in City People is the illusion of perfection, particularly as it manifests in the lives of upper-middle-class parents in elite urban communities. The novel repeatedly exposes the fragile scaffolding of curated identities, social media images, and polished appearances that conceal deeper struggles.
Susan Harris, whose suicide frames the narrative, becomes the most tragic emblem of this theme. Outwardly, she is a successful psychologist, a mother involved in her child’s elite education, and a woman engaged in wellness culture and professional productivity.
Her Instagram feed, conversations with friends, and professional contributions portray her as balanced and wise. Yet her posthumous letter reveals a vastly different reality—one of deep loneliness, emotional exhaustion, and invisibility.
This theme is mirrored in the lives of other mothers: Bhavna’s obsession with appearances, Penelope’s role as the queen bee of parent circles, and Amy’s tight grip on control all stem from a need to project mastery over their lives. However, each of them experiences private cracks—whether through financial insecurity, marital strain, or emotional repression—that threaten to break the illusion.
The novel suggests that these curated personas are not just dishonest but dangerous, contributing to isolation and shame when reality fails to live up to image. The more these women strive to appear perfect, the more alienated they become from themselves and each other.
In this way, City People makes a powerful statement about the cost of chasing perfection in a society that prizes optics over authenticity.
Motherhood and Identity
The novel provides a poignant, often painful exploration of how motherhood reshapes, consumes, and sometimes erases personal identity. Each female character in the novel is, in one way or another, negotiating her sense of self in relation to motherhood.
For Vic, single motherhood becomes a source of financial and emotional instability, but also of artistic paralysis. She no longer knows where the mother ends and the writer begins.
Bhavna views motherhood as a performance closely tied to social mobility; her child’s success is a proxy for her own self-worth. Chandice, having experienced miscarriages and now navigating the elite spaces as a Black woman, sees motherhood as both a gift and a challenge to her autonomy.
Amy tries to maintain control by isolating herself emotionally, defining motherhood through discipline and success, yet never fully engaging with the emotional complexity it demands. The most striking example, however, is Susan, who feels so consumed by the role that her other identities—intellectual, friend, partner—have withered.
Her final letter details the annihilation of her inner life under the relentless weight of maternal responsibility. The novel doesn’t romanticize motherhood; it presents it as a deeply ambivalent experience—one filled with love, but also with loss of self, social judgment, and mental strain.
City People critiques a society that idealizes mothers while offering them little support. It interrogates the cultural norms that expect women to find complete fulfillment in caregiving roles, often at the cost of their psychological well-being.
Mental Health and Social Silence
Mental health is perhaps the novel’s most urgent and recurring concern, underscored by the central event of Susan’s suicide. What makes the portrayal especially resonant is the disconnect between external perception and internal reality.
Susan is not the stereotypical image of someone struggling with mental illness. She is accomplished, attractive, respected.
Her suicide stuns the community not just because of its suddenness, but because it challenges their understanding of what emotional suffering looks like. The narrative reveals how mental health is often hidden, especially among women expected to “have it all.”
Many characters recognize symptoms of distress in themselves—Vic’s anxiety and depression, Kara’s compulsive behavior, Chandice’s suppressed trauma, Amy’s emotional isolation—but lack a language or space to express it. The grief meetings and school gatherings are more concerned with optics than healing, underscoring the community’s reluctance to confront emotional pain head-on.
Susan’s academic work on maternal suicide further illustrates the theme. Her research is clinical, detached, and treated as professional output, even though it contains deeply personal anguish.
The epilogue reveals that she was writing about herself, a heartbreaking demonstration of how thoroughly society can silence mental suffering. This silence is not merely passive; it is reinforced by performance, ambition, and fear of stigma.
City People critiques this silence by showing its tragic consequences. It argues for a cultural shift toward vulnerability, community, and emotional honesty.
Surveillance, Judgment, and Social Performance
The theme of being watched—and of watching others—is central to the emotional dynamics of City People. Characters are constantly performing roles, often with the awareness of being observed by other mothers, school administrators, neighbors, and even their children.
Social media amplifies this performance, as do school events, WhatsApp groups, and playground encounters. The pressure to appear composed, successful, and engaged becomes a kind of constant surveillance, leading characters to police their behavior and conceal weakness.
Kara literalizes this theme with her obsessive observation of Susan’s building and its inhabitants, driven by both grief and an old trauma. Her fixation reveals how surveillance can be born of pain, but also how it distorts reality.
Penelope exemplifies another facet of this theme: her concern with managing narratives, avoiding scandal, and performing empathy without engaging in authentic connection. Even Michael, Susan’s husband, becomes a subject of scrutiny after her death, with various characters trying to read his impassive behavior for signs of guilt or detachment.
The novel critiques a society that has turned human interaction into spectacle and performance. Authenticity is not just risky but potentially penalized.
The act of watching becomes a substitute for the act of knowing, and judgments are rendered based on curated moments rather than truth. Ultimately, City People suggests that living under such relentless observation limits the possibility for real intimacy, understanding, or empathy.
It argues for breaking free from the gaze of others in order to truly see—and support—one another.