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.
Themes
Importance of Community and Found Family
In group therapy, Casper asks the girls who their friends and community are “on the outside” (68), the people who keep their secrets and make them feel safe. For most of the story, Charlie does not feel safe with anyone. Part of her journey in the novel is figuring out how to establish trust and build healthy relationships with people who will see and value her and who can support her recovery.
After her father’s suicide, Charlie was not safe with her mother, who was physically and emotionally abusive. Though she romanticizes her friendship with Ellis, Charlie was not safe with her either, as Ellis sold her out to her parents to protect her boyfriend. Losing Ellis to brain damage fills Charlie with guilt, but their friendship was not always healthy for her. Evan and Dump cared about Charlie because they prevented her from being raped but were the reason she ended up in Frank’s sex house: They wanted drugs, and Frank promised them. After Charlie’s suicide attempt, they brought her to the hospital and followed up to make sure she was okay, but their addictions made them unreliable.
By the time she wakes up at Creeley, Charlie feels alone, and she is terrified of being discharged because she has no one “outside” who she feels safe with and who she feels will keep her secrets. She knows instinctively that returning to her mother would be a disaster, but as she is still a minor, that is her only option. Mikey steps in to bring her to Arizona, with his and her mother’s help, but he cannot offer her what she wants from him, which is a romantic relationship. She resents that he has a girlfriend and a life beyond Charlie. For as long as she can remember, she has felt like she is on the outside looking in, and Mikey’s relationship amplifies her feelings, in particular because she idealized him as the one who would prove she was worthy of love.
Her trust issues make it difficult for her to develop friendships, and the one person who offers her a sense of belonging is Riley. He becomes her primary focus, but he is caught in his own cycle of addition and pulls her down with him, as Linus had warned Charlie would happen. The challenges Charlie faces, to gain a voice and be active in her recovery, are amplified while she is with Riley. Finding him with Wendy and his abusive response to her in that moment pushes Charlie over the edge, but her breakdown is what reveals how many people truly do care about her—Linus, Tanner, Blue, and Felix among them. Empowered by telling her and Louisa’s story in her comic, Charlie returns to Tucson and enters into a true friendship with Blue, who is on a healing journey with the help of the building’s tenants. At the end of the novel, Charlie and Blue find a community of supportive people who they can relate to and trust.
Importance of Creating Healthy Cycles
The novel demonstrates how cycles are created and perpetuated. This applies equally to healthy and destructive cycles. In Charlie’s case, family problems and financial limitations contribute to her problems. Her early anger and frustration stem from her father’s suicide and troubled relationship with her mother. These made it difficult for her to relate to her peers, which fueled her loneliness and pain, which led to her cutting. As Casper explains, cutting also creates a cycle of pain and shame.
Creeley presents an opportunity for Charlie to commit to recovery, but she does not have insurance or enough money to pay out of pocket. She is discharged prematurely just as she has a breakthrough and is thrust into a new town and situation in which she has to fend for herself. Though she finds a job, it is far from enough to provide for housing, food, and other essentials. Her circumstances make her vulnerable to exploitation, and Riley jumps into that gap, spurred by his own demons and addictions.
When Charlie receives Riley’s approval and attention, it keeps her focused on him, and she allows other opportunities to slip away. She cannot bring herself to befriend Bunny, Mikey’s fiancée, and Ariel triggers overwhelm by repeatedly remarking how young and vulnerable Charlie is. Her challenges and problems become a toxic cycle—lack of money makes her vulnerable to Riley’s exploitation, which makes her feel simultaneously dependent and ashamed of her dependence, which prevents her from connecting with others.
Two events motivate Charlie to break the cycle: Blue’s arrival in Tucson and Louisa’s suicide. Though Charlie is suspicious of Blue’s motives, she identifies with her. Blue is the first person in Tucson who enables Charlie to see beyond her own world, and she realizes that Blue is as lonely as Charlie is. She begins to believe that the two girls could have a mutually supportive friendship, and they are working toward that when they receive news of Louisa’s suicide.
It becomes the catalyst for a major change, first by propelling Blue to return to using crack. That episode is so destructive for both Blue and Charlie that they both realize how desperately they want to change their lives. Charlie finally has time to heal her body and spirit after Linus and Tanner take her to Santa Fe. Reading Louisa’s story empowers her to tell it, and seeing herself in Louisa helps her realize the importance of telling her own story. With her friends and her art, Charlie begins to set a new healing cycle into motion.
The Need to Embrace Duality
In Part 1, Girl in Pieces introduces the dual nature of elements that are often thought of as binaries: pleasure and pain; beauty and ugliness; safe and dangerous.
When describing her cutting, Charlie notes how it is paradoxically both pain and comfort: “It fucking hurts, hurts, hurts. But when the blood comes, everything is warmer, and calmer” (44). Her bloody, self-inflicted wounds provide a locus of attention: Attending to them—rubbing ointment into them and wrapping them in bandages—provides an opportunity to self-soothe that she does not know how to do with her emotional trauma. The coping mechanisms Casper teaches Charlie and the girls at Creeley are a way to the coexistence of pleasure and pain. Both pleasure and pain are, at varying degrees of intensity, a part of life. For Charlie to be healthy, she must confront her pain and develop healthy ways to cope with it.
Charlie’s scars serve a similar role in her recovery. She fears that Louisa is right about their scars making them unlovable. For most of the novel, Charlie hides her scars on her arms and upper thighs under long-sleeved shirts and baggy dungarees. Charlie compares herself to Frankenstein’s monster and notes how various people she comes into contact with react to them.
Charlie’s scars sadden Ariel, while one of the artists in Charlie’s show calls them “revolutionary” (303). Riley encourages her not to cover them up, as a middle finger to the world. Julie wants Charlie to cover them because she sees them as a potential trigger for others recovering from self-harming behavior. Blue neither hides nor advertises her scars but simply accepts them as part of who she is. Blue’s is the healthiest response that Charlie encounters; the scars are evidence that she has survived trauma and pain.
Safe and dangerous are also revealed to be two parts of a whole. Charlie feels both safe and panicky within Creeley’s environment. Paradoxically, the safety feels dangerous because it may cause her to let down her guard, and she has learned that being vulnerable leads to trouble. Frank exploited vulnerable young girls, and his demand that she either prostitute herself or be thrown out led to her suicide attempt. In Tucson, Riley took advantage of Charlie’s vulnerability, while others—Linus, Ariel, and Felix—wanted to help her. Charlie’s recovery will, paradoxically, require her to let down some of her protective walls to enable those who are worthy of her trust to help her.
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