These Is My Words is a coming-of-age story that granularly depicts Sarah Prine’s transition to maturity. In realistic fashion, this growth process is neither even nor consistent. Rather, Sarah’s growth to maturity gradually shifts from exercises in external reference and youthful mimicry to internal understanding through self-reflection.

Early in the novel, Sarah first shows growth through her observations and emulation of Savannah and her reading of etiquette manuals like The Happy Bride. These early stages in Sarah’s maturation process are external to her own experience, guided by models and source guides that she references toward becoming a proper—and, therefore, marriageable—lady. To avoid becoming an “old maid,” she seeks to be seen as appealingly feminine, rather than the boyish girl she was on Papa’s New Mexico ranch. Thus, additional influences on Sarah’s early growth come from the page she finds from The Duchess of Warwick and the Sears and Roebuck catalog at Mr. Fish’s store, which features pictures of beautiful dresses she wants to own. Her early externalized exercises in growing up link womanhood to behaving and being seen by others as a lady. As such, Sarah aspires early on only to achieve the appearance of growth, as manifested by the physical and performative trappings of womanhood: She is interested in pretty dresses and how to behave properly around men, but her conception of maturity doesn’t reach beyond these parameters.