Drug usage
The usage of drugs is a defining imagery of this memoir, which is unfortunate in any case, but especially here, because it isn't the memoirist who struggled with addiction. It was her parents. She was just a baby when her father ends up in prison for selling hard drugs in a network of criminals. He comes back to the family after what was probably not a very fun prison sentence, and immediately, Liz's life takes a turn for the worst. She watches in a state of childish innocence and confusion, unable to emotionally process the changes in her home. Her parents do drugs every day in front of her.
Family dysfunction
It is impossible to be addicted to hard drugs and then also be a solid member of a family. Instead of supporting their daughters, these parents set their daughters up for failure in life by raising them in highly dysfunctional ways. The girls are subject to their parents' wild mood swings, emotions of an ultimate sincerity because of the severity of addiction. Liz's memoir shows that dysfunction was the norm, but in a tragic twist of fate, the children are unable to discern that the extreme emotions relate to states of consciousness attained by extreme drug usage. In other words, the adult imagery is that they need their fix and get extreme when the drugs run out, but the child imagery is just that the parents are extreme and scary.
School and hope
In light of the terror of home and the sadness that dominates that part of life, school becomes a place of solace for Liz. She is brilliant (probably because of her entire life being trauma-filled, leaving her with a desperate thirst for knowledge), but school is not necessarily her favorite exercise. Rather, she connects "going to school" with "leaving the house." This imagery grows into her attending Harvard and becoming a teacher herself. This shows that through self-improvement and education, a person can overcome extreme circumstances.
Tragic downfall
The memoir notices a few important tragic downfalls where her parents are reconciled with their hubris. The mother's hubris is that her children are probably fine. That is pride because she is deciding what she wants and then assuming fate will allow her to have her cake and eat it too. When Liz reports that she has been molested by Ma's drug dealer, Ma experiences anagnorisis and unravels, finally forced to admit that she is not actually mothering her children at all. She is mostly just doing drugs and telling the kids what to do. The other downfall is her unfortunate contraction of AIDS and her death in the AIDS epidemic.
