Their relationship and their mutual obsession is a downfall for the women, both of their stories ending somewhat ambiguously but with implied death. As The Guardian notes:

“In the great novels of ill-fated passion [...] the story is richly embedded in a social world that makes the lovers feel doomed partly by forces outside their control. Here the two women live ordinary middle-class lives, going to the theatre, taking the narrator’s daughter to school. I couldn’t quite believe in the necessity for them to destroy themselves. Even the breast cancer felt curiously expedient, as though the illness was a necessary consequence of the destruction, rather than a cause of it.”

I am a strong defender of LGBT novels being allowed to portray imperfect characters, unhealthy romance, queer death. However, Delabroy-Allard’s impotence as a writer, the shallowness of this story and the characters means that the absurd and melodramatic demise of the characters inevitably reads as a punishment for the women’s sapphic love.

The Guardian also described All About Sarah as “pushed almost to the point of comedy in a book that still manages to remain humourless” which is especially prominent at the novel’s end when the protagonist, in response to Sarah’s illness/implied death abandons her young child, leaves France for Italy, aimlessly roams around Trieste for a while and then stops eating and drinking, lays down in a bed for several days in a pool of her own piss, and finally perishes like a Victorian maiden dying of a broken heart.