With candor, Barry investigates many traumatic moments from her childhood and traces the way they shaped her identity throughout her adolescence and into adulthood. Some experiences are powerfully and obviously damaging, while others are much smaller and subtler. Barry argues that all of these experiences can have a profound effect on the formation of the self.

The most central and enduring trauma Barry faces is abuse at the hands of her mother. Barry rarely portrays scenes of physical aggression directly, but regularly describes her mother as violent. Her portrait of her mother reflects Barry’s own fractured identity, full of moments that are impossible to forget whose effects the reader can clearly see but whose pure content has been repressed—for example, when her mother yells at her for drawing a picture for her teacher. Barry does tuck in many small moments of verbal abuse from her mother, often included under a somewhat unrelated reflection. Barry would rather approach the abuse, obliquely hiding it under other thoughts rather than portraying it center stage. This dramatizes the fracturing of her identity as she holds and presents two conflicting thoughts at the same time.

Barry describes this fracturing of identity more overtly in the difficult chapter where she alludes to, but doesn’t directly describe, a childhood sexual assault.