Content Warning: This section references bullying, abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation.

“I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”

The novel opens with its central conceit, suggesting that time has a spatial dimension and establishing the centrality of Memory and the Passage of Time. This informs both the novel’s narrative structure and much of Elaine’s own life. The imagery introduces a concept of time that differs from the traditional linear form and asks readers to consider how the past infringes upon and impacts the present. The final sentence, “Nothing goes away,” lays the groundwork for the novel’s rising action, in which Elaine’s present is inextricably linked to her past.

“I can feel my throat tightening, a pain along the jawline. I’ve started to chew my fingers again. There’s blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange Popsicles, penny gumboils, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.”

Elaine begins to remember the past via traditional nostalgic symbols of candy. However, these objects quickly give way to dissonant memories of “gnawed hair” and “dirty ice”—an uncomfortable sensory combination that casts a violent tone over the past. It becomes clear that the taste of orange popsicles, the symbol of childhood, is tied up somehow with the taste of blood.

“This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by no possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance.

But since coming back here I don’t feel weightier.”

This quotation introduces the bridge as a symbol of the adult Elaine’s position halfway between her violent childhood and some unknown future. The bridge is suspended over a river, which evokes the ravine of Elaine’s childhood, a place of both imagined and actual violence.