Content Warning: This section discusses racism, domestic violence, sex trafficking, abortion, wrongful commitment to and medical abuse of patients in a psychiatric hospital, ableism, anti-gay bias, and murder.

“The dream was like those paper dolls, the only dolls she had had as a child, dolls with blond paper hair and Anglo features and big paper smiles. That she knew in her heart of ashes the dream was futile did not make it less precious.”

Connie imagines her dream of having a family as being as fragile as a paper doll. Significantly, the dolls do not look like Connie and her family but have “blond paper hair and Anglo features”—an indication of how society privileges whiteness that helps establish The Intersectional Nature of Feminist Struggle. Despite the dolls’ difference from Connie, she sees them as precious and desirable, indicating a degree of internalized racism. Nevertheless, she recognizes that her dream of having a family is as fragile as the dolls themselves.

“Casually the woman arrayed her fragile possessions on the counter and, with a gesture like emptying an ashtray, dropped them into an envelope and locked them away.”

Throughout her hospitalization, Connie is dehumanized and neglected. Connie owns little, and these “fragile possessions” are important to her, but the woman doing intake treats them with disgust and derision, as if they were the disposable contents of “an ashtray.”

“Geraldo was almost demure. He had a good manner with authority, as any proper pimp should, respectful but confident. Man to man, pimp and doctor discussed her condition, while Dolly sobbed.”

Throughout her experiences, Connie exhibits sardonic humor. She notes that Geraldo is good with authority figures and a “proper pimp”—a near oxymoron. While the novel frames Geraldo’s exploitation of women as anything but “proper,” he is able to disguise his true nature and lie to the doctor, as the narration wryly observes. Geraldo’s ability to address the doctor on equal footing also tacitly associates the medical profession with sex trafficking, developing the theme of