“For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story.” 

In the opening lines of the book, August creates uncertainty around her mother’s death. She acknowledges that her mother, at some point, died—but the assertion that she “wasn’t dead yet” goes unexplained for most of the book. Eventually, it is clear that this line has a hidden meaning. For a long time, August didn’t believe her mother was dead, and thus did not experience her as being dead (yet). 

“I had been home for a month watching my father die. Death didn’t frighten me. Not now. Not anymore. But Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat.” 

August compares the difficulty of mourning her father with the difficulty of coping with her past in Brooklyn. As an anthropologist studying death, she feels prepared for her father’s passing. However, back in Brooklyn, she is haunted by the less-certain end to some of her friendships, as well as the imprint that time in her life made on her. She will wrestle with this in the pages to come.

“Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone.” 

August stresses the paradoxes in her friendships. The girls are at once together and alone; it is their shared sense of loneliness that binds them together. Neither that togetherness nor their beauty can protect them from the loneliness inherent in their difficult family situations.