Girl in Pieces

Part 1 introduces Charlie, the first-person narrator, as she recovers from her suicide attempt. Charlie’s narrative jumps between her present in the group home and her past experiences that culminated in her suicide attempt. Her narrative is stream-of-consciousness fragments, reflecting her shattered emotional state. Charlie is a “girl in pieces”: Her trauma has broken her internally, and the scars she has marked her body with reflect that internal state.

Charlie briefly wakes up at the hospital, having cut her stomach, thighs, and arms so badly that she needed extensive stitches and bandages. Charlie had intended to end her life, but even before she was suicidal, she had practiced self-harm by cutting herself with broken glass. Casper describes self-harm, as a cycle of pain, scarring, and shame. Those who self-harm impose physical pain on their bodies as a way to relieve the internal pressure that trauma imposes. It is a form of release, but it leads to scarring, which leads to shame, which leads to more pain, which sets the self-destructive cycle back in motion.

Vinny rubbing warm ointment into Charlie’s wounds reminds her of “the best part” of her first cutting experience: treating her wounds after. Creating pain provides a means of self-soothing that is itself paradoxical: The cutting is painful, but the bleeding makes everything “warmer, and calmer” (44). Casper introduces ways to self-soothe that are not destructive: snapping a rubber band on her wrist, repetitive motion, and drawing, which provides a way for Charlie to experience release and express her emotions when words feel too overwhelming.

Though she does not explicitly say so, Charlie is experiencing selective mutism. It becomes clear through her fractured narrative and information gaps. She hints at the events that led her to Creeley, disclosing that she feels hunted, fearing that Frank would come after her. Photos of her friends “before everything blew to hell” (22) suggest significant traumatic events involving them that are revealed later in the novel. School evokes painful memories of bullying, negative experiences with medications, and expulsion. When she feels threatened, as when Blue reads Charlie’s response aloud in group, she gets her “street feeling,” which she describes as a heightened state of alertness, suggesting that she has been homeless (39). In moments of overwhelm, when words feel impossible, Charlie uses violence to communicate, imposed both on herself (through cutting) and others. The latter occurs when Barbero refuses to tell her how long she has been at Creeley; Charlie reacts physically, throwing a chair, kicking the nurse’s station. She feels a similar impulse when Blue taunts her in group. Charlie wants to attack Blue but contains herself. Later in the book, she will lash out at Riley physically to communicate her overwhelming helplessness and despair over their destructive relationship.

The absence of specifics in this section speaks to Charlie’s difficulty communicating verbally. She is so overwhelmed by her experiences that she cannot contain them into a coherent narrative, but she can describe sensory images and experiences that her memories evoke. The narrative consists more of word paintings than a clear chronicle of events.

Ordering and describing events into a narrative can be a way of imposing structure and order, concepts that simultaneously soothe and panic Charlie. On the one hand, they evoke school and the trauma associated with it. However, structure and order can also provide predictability and stability, which Charlie experiences in a healthy way at Creeley. Part of Charlie’s journey in the novel will be to develop her own stable patterns rather than falling into unhealthy ones. The more fragmented the narrative becomes, the more Charlie is experiencing internal turmoil, pulling herself further from recovery.