In The Lonely Hearts Hotel, Heather O’Neill explores maternal ambivalence in relationship to pregnancy loss by way of daydream narratives that enable her character to engage in impossible relationships. During her first two pregnancies, the protagonist struggles to imagine her future children. Her subsequent miscarriages metaphorically symbolize her inability to see herself as anything more than a child. It is only in her third miscarriage that Rose allows herself to daydream about her baby, carrying her grief out of her body and into an imaginary, outer world. O’Neill adopts Quebecois aesthetics of defeat and stylizes them through fanciful capsules of loss that ultimately empower her heroine. In doing so, the author alters daydreaming from whimsical, child-like behavior to as a mechanism of mourning and an eventual source of hope.