Finding Me: A Memoir

An important symbol in the book is Viola and her family’s first apartment in Central Falls, 128 Washington Street. Nicknamed simply “128,” the apartment comes to serve as a codeword for “hell” among her and her sisters. As a symbol, it represents the challenges and adversities of Viola’s childhood. The apartment is located in a condemned building; it is extremely unsafe because faulty wiring causes fires to break out frequently; there is rarely any electricity, heat, gas, or running water; the place is rat-infested, with rodents coming out in droves at night and destroying everything in the apartment; and it is a place where Viola’s family experiences harassment from their neighbors. The conditions of the apartment highlight specific aspects of Viola’s childhood: the abject poverty, food insecurity, lack of physical safety, and consistent trauma. All of these contribute to the extreme shame that Viola feels about her circumstances, contributing to her desire to exorcise or “detox” this part of her life; it is what stands in the way of her reconciling her childhood self with her identity as an adult. Just as she begins to climb out of her family’s cycle of poverty, she is faced with a reminder of the past when she first opens the door to the apartment she is subletting during her first year at Juilliard.