Essay Questions

What are the main character’s main addictions throughout the story, and how do they reflect her innocence or lack thereof?

First, she is addicted to food and gains weight at the beginning of the story, which is a fairly normal problem for a teenager to have. She struggles with being accepted and is addicted to perpetuating a more solid self-image, once again a fairly normal thing for a teenager to worry about. Soon after, she begins to do LSD, which is the beginning of her downfall and her metaphorical loss of innocence. Soon after, she begins chasing highs, addicted to the feeling of hard drugs. It is in this time that she loses her virginity in the midst of a trip. She then becomes addicted to sleeping pills, then marijuana. She becomes a drug dealer, severing all ties to her past when she runs away from home. Her spiraling drug use is symptomatic of her growing up and her desire to run away and cut ties with her family.

When does the main character promise to quit drugs, and why does she fail every time?

The first time she tries to quit drugs is after she unwittingly tries LSD for the first time, but does not succeed due to her desire to fit in and be popular. She tries to quit after losing her virginity while under the influence, but she is too addicted to the feeling to be successful at that attempt. When she ran away from home, she tried to quit, but failed after a sexual assault. Again, she tried to quit once returning home, but her addiction stopped her short of success. After a two year gap in the story, the main character says she has wasted her life, and tries to quit once again. She fails this time because Jan laces her tea with LSD, and she is institutionalized. The final time she fails is when she overdoses on drugs, and the ending is ambiguous enough to imply that she could have purposefully done it.

Imagine you are the lawyer representing the main character’s assets after she overdosed on drugs. Make a case against her drug overdose being purposeful so her family can recover her assets.

First, she had close ties to her family. Despite her decision to run away, she was very close to her grandfather, her mother, and father. Her grandfather’s death rocked her world and drove her to use drugs. Traumatic events often shock people to their core, and she was no exception. She returned to her family after her brief stint away–and seeing as she did not go to college, this was a brief period of her life in which she experienced freedom. Second, she tried to quit drugs without a proper treatment program multiple times, showing that she wanted to quit, she simply did not know how. Finally, her drug addiction started when she was accidentally dosed, which is a criminal charge. Her assets should not be given to the state, but to her family because she was of sound mind, her overdose was accidental because she loved her family and life very much.