“My mind does this all the time—shows me these movies that seem so real that they carry me away inside of them. They are a relief from my real life.” 

When Ally feels anxiety, one of her coping mechanisms is to create humorous scenes in her head, based on real life. For example, when her teacher, Mrs. Hall, makes her do a writing assignment, Ally imagines Mrs. Hall dressed as a sheriff and herself dressed as a prisoner, reflecting the way she feels about the situation at hand. In this sense, Ally’s “mind movies” also serve as a means of processing her surroundings, giving her a constructive way to co-mingle logical and emotional information. Ally’s unique way of processing information—and the advantage of her uniqueness—becomes a consistent theme in Fish in a Tree. 

“Alice in Wonderland—a book about living in a world where nothing makes sense made perfect sense to me.”

Ally and her mother talk about her connection to the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which her recently deceased grandfather read to her. Ally identifies with the book, not only because she associates it with her grandfather—a wise man who seemed to understand Ally’s unique way of thinking—but because she identifies with Alice. School and social interactions are often befuddling to Ally, and she feels like she, too, is living in a Wonderland where “nothing makes sense.” Her connection with this book is also significant because Ally has great difficulty reading due to her dyslexia.