Mim uses writing and music to cope with the things in life that she can’t control. She first started writing at six years old, after her Aunt Isabel told her that writing could help take the edge off and prevent her from “succumbing to the madness of the world” (22). Mim often writes letters to her in-utero half-sister, Isabel. Although the letters are addressed to Isabel, they’re really a chance for Mim to explore her thoughts and feelings. When she begins writing the letters, she makes general statements that she later rescinds, like saying that people are generally awful only to later say that many are worthwhile. These changes in the letters reveal how she herself changes from the beginning of the road trip to the end.

Music, like writing, provides a creative escape for Mim. She loves Elvis and Johnny Cash because her mom does, and she subsumes much of her identity from her mom’s. However, she also finds comfort in the music of “Bon Iver, Elliott Smith, [and] Arcade Fire” because their music “demands not to be liked but to be believed” (90). She feels connected to these artists because they seem to genuinely understand pain. At the beginning of her journey, Mim believes pain to be one of the highest virtues that shapes and defines a person.