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Hayley’s diary symbolizes one’s unknowability; one can never be sure that one truly knows and understands another person. It is also a motif that points to The Importance of Feeling One’s Feelings. Ella is “surprised by the choice” of a plain, black book (47), expecting the Hayley she knows to have covered the front with stickers instead. In an attempt to rationalize her desire to read her best friend’s most private thoughts, Ella thinks, “There’s nothing in there she wouldn’t have shared with me anyway. Right?” (47), a question that foreshadows the fact that the book contains any number of—and perhaps only—thoughts and feelings that Hayley never shared with Ella. When Sawyer once joked about reading Hayley’s diary to see what it said about him, Hayley spoke uncharacteristically sharply, claiming that she needed “one place [she] c[ould] dump everything. Everything. Even [her] darkest, most vile confessions, without thinking someone might judge [her]” (47). This description of the book’s contents seems hyperbolic, like Ella’s comparison of the diary to the One Ring of Power, an allusion to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Ella thinks that, in Hayley’s eyes, someone acquiring access to the book and its contents “would destroy [Hayley’s] universe” (47). However, Ella has no idea how little such a claim exaggerates: how the book contains Hayley’s worst fears about herself, including that she is unlovable; how it describes her sexual relationship with Sam, an illegal one because she is a minor and his student; and how it tells of Hayley’s guilt for remaining in a relationship where she is physically abused and how she has judged others for making similar choices. Hayley kept the diary because she must have realized the importance of processing her feelings—no matter how “vile,” difficult, or shameful they felt to her—and since she could tell no one in her life about them, she could at least tell her diary.
Harlow uses Hayley’s jewelry as a motif to highlight The Cyclical Nature of Abuse. Despite being offered access to all of Hayley’s jewelry, most of which are family heirlooms, Ella selects a “delicate gold chain with one charm, a tiny gold circle with the outline of the state of Georgia stamped in the center” (43). Despite Ella’s surprise when Hayley chose it—because Hayley always slighted their home state—Hayley explained the piece, saying, “It’s where we met and fell in love” (44). The fact that Hayley chose and wore this necklace instead of her other, more valuable family jewelry corresponds to her status as the character who breaks her family’s pattern of abuse, passed from mother to daughter, much like the jewelry was. Hayley once told Ella that the family jewels “are the only things of Phoebe’s [she] can inherit that don’t involve trauma or alcoholism” (43). However, she always kept them in her jewelry box, choosing not to wear them despite their lack of negative associations. Now, Ella thinks that “all Phoebe’s legacies end” with Phoebe herself because she cannot continue to pass on her traumas and pain to her daughter and is too old to have more children (43). An inebriated Phoebe actually acknowledges this end of the cycle when Ella confronts her at the fall festival, saying, “And I deserved better than my mom, and on and on,” and that “this is one of the happier endings” because, having died, Hayley has escaped the cycle that Phoebe assumes she would have perpetuated (189). Hayley’s choice not to wear Phoebe’s family’s jewelry mirrors her choice to cut Phoebe out of her life after the accident; she will “inherit” nothing from Phoebe, neither tangible material objects nor the emotional trauma that could result in a perpetuation of the pattern of abuse that has long characterized their family, given Phoebe’s description.
Harlow uses therapy as a motif to illuminate The Importance of Feeling One’s Feelings and The Futility of Guilt. Significantly, characters who embrace therapy, who take advantage of it as a space to be honest and to get honest feedback, are the most capable of accepting personal responsibility for their choices and letting go of whatever doesn’t serve them. In the domestic violence shelter, Hayley attends regular group therapy and says, “Anytime I get up the guts to admit to a thought or feeling that I’ve been stuffing down into a barrel of shame, […] at least one other person says, ‘Same, girl.’ It’s usually way more than just one, a full chorus of ‘Same, sister, same’” (277). This description of her experiences shows how healing it can be to acknowledge even one’s most humiliating truths. Further, it emphasizes that the guilt and shame that one feels can be instantly lessened by the knowledge that not only will others not judge but so many people also share the same feelings.
Likewise, Ella reports that Sawyer meets with Ms. Powell, the new school psychologist, weekly, demonstrating his commitment to choosing differently from his father and breaking the cycle of abuse in his family. The counselor gives him work, and he always does it, prompting Ella to tease him that he never does the homework for his classes as religiously. Sawyer says that “no lesson has ever felt as important as the ones Ms. Powell is teaching him” (304). Sawyer realizes that continuing to bottle up his feelings will only lead to more explosive anger, so he goes to therapy to healthily process his difficult past and resultant emotions. Ella even sees Scott—a boy who has spoken cruelly to her several times about the accident—“slink” into the psychologist’s office, and she thinks, “Maybe there’s hope for him yet” (304). Sawyer's experiences and Ella’s hopefulness for Scott highlight the role that therapy plays in helping one work through one’s feelings and let go of unproductive guilt and shame.
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