Maureen, a protagonist character in A Long Way Down, opened the plot with a very passive and depressed mindset along with a guilty conscience. Before she befriended Martin, Jess, and JJ, she was seriously considering and planning her suicide attempt. Notifying her son, Matty, of a make-believe New Year’s Eve get-together at a church friend’s house, she instead intended on climbing the stairs to the roof of Topper’s House to throw herself over, plummeting to her death (Hornby 4). The fact that she generated this idea and informed her son about it months in advance shows that she was committed, proving that she was indeed unhappy with her life. Maureen felt this way because she believed she was trapped. As a result of her son not having acquired…show more content… “I was crying because all I wanted in the world, the only thing that would make me want to live, was for Matty to die. And knowing why I was crying just made me cry more,” thinks Maureen (Hornby 39). It was suggested that her life was taken away from her when Matty was born, as she also mentioned she used to work, but quit. The amount of distress exhibited in the previous quote from Maureen’s narration shows that her son, unfortunately, contributed to the majority of her sadness, and it also demonstrates the guilt she has for feeling this way, only adding to her grief. "He ruined my life, but he was still my son..." (Hornby 12). Even though Matty took away numerous opportunities for her to experience and live her life, he was still her son, and she could not abandon…show more content… By the end of the novel, she was hired for a job and became a part of trivia group, or "quiz team" as they called it, with two nurses from the care home. This is something she would have never done before because she wanted to stay home to watch Matty. It also showed decrease in her depression and proved she was becoming more outgoing, as she was willing to participate in these activities. Before, Maureen most likely would have declined the job offer to stay home, but even though the position paid even less than what it cost to cover care for Matty, Maureen still wanted it, showing her eagerness. She even started drinking alcohol, which was quite unlike the Maureen from the beginning of the story because of the way she acted at the party. Maureen had also initially stopped attending church at the start of A Long Way Down for the reason that she was ashamed of all the sins she had committed, such as lying to her son and having intercourse outside of marriage with his father; she thought she was not worthy of the gift of going to church. However, after her job offer and first trivia night, she went back to her church for the first time since New Year's Eve. Since going to church had been an issue which she had struggled with since the start, the fact that she now had that confidence to go in and