“My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle.” 

Mailhot’s first words of her memoir recount the way her depiction of her own pain sounds like a plea for help, or a trick. She describes her story as “maltreated” to explain the ways she and her story were not taken seriously because of bias, pain, and lack of empathy. 

“The man I had been conditioning was not happy with me. He knew something was wrong, and that’s when I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer.” 

Mailhot’s early depictions of her love as conditioning and crisis speak to the chaos of her love life, and the pain she experiences in relationships. Here she talks specifically about her relationship with Casey, which later led her to collapse into a mental breakdown. 

“Sometimes grief is a nothing feeling.” 

Mailhot describes the numbness of depression as she grieves the many losses of her life. The nothingness she feels returns again and again in the collection as she struggles with suicidal ideation.