What is the thesis of Drinking Coffee Elswhere by Z.Z. Packer

The main idea refers to the main character's coping strategy, namely pretending to be somewhere else when the pain she is enduring becomes too much to handle. After Dina makes the dean's dubious watch list for naming a revolver as the inanimate object she'd most like to transform into during Yale freshman orientation, she becomes a sort of self-made outcast. When she meets Heather, she becomes even more on the outside looking in becasue heather herself is already an outcast at school.