58 pages • 1 hour read
Kathleen GlasgowGirl in Pieces
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Casper’s Turtle
Creeley Center’s therapist Casper has a tank in her office that holds a lone turtle. During her sessions, Charlie watches the turtle slowly move through its quiet, underwater world. Sometimes, she envies its “peaceful life” (18) and isolation; other times, she recognizes the loneliness of isolation and would not want to be the turtle alone in its tank.
Charlie’s complex feelings about the turtle reflect her complex feelings about engaging with the world. On the one hand, she feels “lonely in the world” (27), as if she never fit in. Her friendship with Ellis allowed Charlie to experience acceptance and connection, but it had its complications. The two could be competitive with each other, and Ellis struggled with her own issues, including disordered eating. When confronted by her parents with drugs they found, Ellis told them they belonged Charlie, though they actually belonged to Ellis’ boyfriend. This prompted a downward spiral that culminated in Charlie’s homelessness and suicide attempt.
Isolation feels safe to Charlie, and cutting allows her to put up an emotional and physical wall to protect herself. Feeling vulnerable, Charlie pushes Ariel away and struggles to trust Linus, Tanner, and Blue. Developing relationships requires trust, and trust requires vulnerability. By the end of the novel, Charlie begins to recognize who will value her vulnerability, be worthy of her trust, and reciprocate in kind, including Linus, Blue, and Felix.
Blue’s Cereal
The night before Charlie is discharged, she wakes up suddenly from a nightmare to find Blue kneeling beside her bed. Blue recounts an experience she had when she was on crack and working at a supermarket. She was so strung out that she began to hear the store laughing at her—“the cereal boxes, the price-stamper, the fucking loading cart, the lights” (93). Everything was laughing at “what a fucked-up asshole I was” (93). At that moment, Blue knew that she would attempt suicide, and that is how she ended up at Creeley.
Blue concludes, “The moral of the story, Charlie, is this: Don’t let the cereal eat you. It’s only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it” (94). The cereal represents things in the world that impose judgment and cause overwhelm. Charlie thinks about Blue’s cereal story when she struggles in Tucson alone. After Luis’ benefit concert, Blue makes Charlie repeat, “The cereal is not eating me” (394). The phrase expresses the importance of not internalizing the world’s judgment and creating a healthy separation between the self and the world.
Ariel’s Postcards
The kitchen counter in Mikey’s apartment is a collage of personal postcards that belongs to the building’s owner, artist Ariel. When Charlie first arrives at the apartment, she runs her “hands over the kitchen counter,” studying the “postcards of foreign cities” that are displayed (110). Some of them have been turned over, revealing the messages written on them: “A: Meet me at the fountain, love, four o’clock, like last year” (110, italics in original). To Charlie, the postcards represent moments from Ariel’s life, parts of her past that, when put together, unfold into a larger story.
This early episode lays the groundwork for a scene between Felix and Charlie later in the novel. In Part 3, after Charlie’s life has imploded, she recovers emotionally and physically at Felix’s estate, and he suggests that everyone experiences a “moment when something so…momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces” (355). It takes a long time, he tells her, “to assemble them in a new way,” one that “you can live with until you know for certain” where each piece should go (355). Charlie’s recovery process includes telling her story through a comic. Both words and images are important, evoking Ariel’s postcard collage counter.
Charlie’s Tender Kit
When Doc Dooley returns Charlie’s backpack to her at Creeley, the first thing she takes out is what she calls her “tender kit” (21). It is an “army medical kit” that she found at a thrift store. The dented metal box with its red cross held her “ointment, gauze, my pieces of broken mason jar in a blue velvet pouch” (21), and other small personal belongings, including money and photos of her friends. The metal box is there, but the staff has emptied it; only her photos are returned to her.
When she arrives in Tucson, Charlie spends her first day restocking her tender kit. She buys a glass bottle of iced tea, drinks it, then breaks the bottle, selecting the largest pieces to be stored in the event she needs the release of cutting. She describes the pieces of broken glass lovingly, calling them “a thousand birds of possibility, all beautiful, spread over the cement, glinting” (113). She assembles the kit meticulously: “nestling all the rolls of gauze, the creams, the tape, the glass in the linen, side by side until everything fits perfectly” (113). The tender kit is her back-up plan, her “[j]ust in case” (113). She feels safer knowing that it is there for her, even though she knows that is “messed up” (113).
Several times during hard times, Charlie feels drawn to cut. During one especially strong moment, she wraps the kit in a towel, buries it in her suitcase, and stashes her suitcase under her tub. Putting the kit out of reach is as far as Charlie’s commitment to recovery can extend when she is in Tucson. When she feels overwhelmed, Charlie uses healthy coping mechanisms, e.g. repetitive motion and drawing, but holding on to the tender kit represents holding on to unhealthy patterns. When she moves to Santa Fe to work for Felix, Charlie leaves her tender kit behind. She has decided to move forward without her unhealthy back-up plan.
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