Intimate suffering
The imagery that best defines the tone of the memoir is that Joy is caused to suffer by her external reality. She looks up to a mother and father that always fight and eventually get divorced while still very young, and then she watches her mother swing from that chaotic inexperience to an orderly person who is also set in his ways. That new father figure is worse, because he has misogynistic tendencies and he plagues the mother and daughter with emotional, physical, and financial abuse, traumatizing Joy in the most horrifyingly intimate and embarrassing ways.
Domination and damnation
The home dynamic is defined by an imagery of domination. Domination occurs when a person is forbidden to do what they desire to do because of the authority of someone who has power over them. For Joy, this imagery has the abstract quality of damnation, because she feels fated to the mistakes of her mother. She grows up with a resent toward her mother and an absolute hatred for the overly-patriarchal authority of her community, and she becomes a free-minded person, until she accidentally condemns herself to playing the role she blamed her mother for playing.
Freedom and ecstasy
These intermittent seasons of being dominated, being denied the things that bring her pleasure—they culminate in ecstatic release of catharsis and growth that also define her life. There is a cycle of mountain-top and valley-bottom experiences that give an ultimate emotional quality to the memoir, because this author is exposing the breadth of her point of view. She knows what it is like to endure seasons of famine and plague, and she knows who she is in seasons of royal pleasure and bounty. This imagery also contains her experiences of enjoyable drugs that she finds in her hippie community.
Karma and memoir
The over-arching concrete imagery of the book is that it is reality, remembered by a person who experienced reality subjectively through the faculties of herself. What is sublime about the memoir is that from that concrete imagery, an abstract imagery arises that is more than the sum of the parts. The portrait of Joy's decisions in one season, and the effects of those decisions shaping the setting of the future scenes—that dynamic culminates into a portrait of karma. Karma can be said to be the dynamic way that choices affect the manifestation of certain narrative arcs in the human life. That is what Joy deduces about her own life by analyzing it through a poetic lens.
