Sharp Objects

“I had no pets to worry about, no plants to leave with a neighbor. Into a duffel bag, I tucked away enough clothes to last me five days, my own reassurance I’d be out of Wind Gap before week’s end. As I took a final glance around my place, it revealed itself to me in a rush. The apartment looked like a college kid’s: cheap, transitory, and mostly inspired.”

Camille’s comment illustrates her detachment from her life in Chicago. Although she’s moved here to start a new life, she hasn’t settled in or made any lasting connections. She felt like she didn’t belong in Wind Gap, and through this comment she’s revealing that she doesn’t feel like she belongs in Chicago, either.

“I take baths. Not showers. I can’t handle the spray, it gets my skin buzzing, like someone’s turned on a switch.”

This is the first time Camille mentions her skin, which, as we will find out in later chapters, is covered in self-inflicted scars. Her skin is a constant source of discomfort. Not only is she ashamed of her scars, keeping them constantly hidden from sight, she’s also plagued by the feeling of her scars, as if they are alive and chiding her.

“For no good reason, I held my breath as I passed the sign welcoming me to Wind Gap, the way kids do when they drive by cemeteries. It had been eight years since I’d been back, but the scenery was visceral.”

The connection to Wind Gap and a cemetery represents the idea that Camille’s hometown has been dead to her for the past eight years, but now that she’s back, it’s haunting her. 

“When I was still in grammar school, maybe twelve, I wandered into a neighbor boy’s hunting shed, a wood-planked shack where the animals were stripped and split. Ribbons of moist, pink flesh dangled from strings, waiting to be dried for jerky. The dirt floor was rusted with blood. The walls were covered with photographs of naked women. Some of the girls were spreading themselves wide, others were being held down and penetrated. One woman was tied up, her eyes glazed, breasts stretched and veined like grapes, as a man took her from behind. I could smell them all in the thick, gory air. At home that night, I slipped a finger under my panties and masturbated for the first time, panting and sick.”

The juxtaposition between gore and pornography being linked to Camille’s first sexual experience represents her complicated relationship towards her own sexuality. This idea is furthered by the fact that after she masturbates for the first time, she simultaneously feels pleasure and guilt. While this theme of Camille’s unhealthy sexuality will be further explored in subsequent chapters, this moment marks the first mention of Camille’s complicated sexual past.

“My mother’s massive house is at the southernmost point of Wind Gap, the wealthy section, if you can count approximately three square blocks of town as a section. She lives in—and I once did too—an elaborate Victorian replete with a widow’s walk, a wraparound veranda, a summer porch jutting toward the back, and a cupola arrowing out of the top. It’s full of cubbyholes and nooks, curiously circuitous. The Victorians, especially southern Victorians, needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotions.”

This description demonstrates the social divide that exists in Wind Gap. The fact that the wealthy section makes up a mere three blocks of Wind Gap reflects the notion that there is far more poverty in the town than wealth. Furthermore, Camille’s negative description of the roominess of her mother’s mansion reflects her internal anger towards her mother’s physical distance towards her as a child, a notion that will be furthered in later chapters. 

“You’d think a lovely thing like my mother was born to be with a big ex-football star. She would have looked just right with a burly, mustached giant. Alan was, if anything, thinner than my mother, with cheekbones that jutted out of his face so high and sharp his eyes turned to almond slivers. I wanted to administer an IV when I saw him.”

This description reflects the fact that Camille knows little about Alan and Adora’s relationship, even though Alan and her mother have been together since she was a baby. Of course, this moment also illustrates Camille’s disdain for Alan, and her inability to understand what her mother sees in him. 

“When my mother is piqued, she has a peculiar tell: She pulls at her eyelashes. Sometimes they come out. During some particularly difficult years when I was a child, she had no eyelashes at all, and her eyes were a constant gluey pink, vulnerable as a lab rabbit’s.”

Despite that Adora has previously been described as beautiful and physically flawless, here, Camille reveals that her mother’s anxiety does take a physical toll. This will be important in later chapters, when her mother’s eyelash pulling starts to reveal her secrets. 

“My mother was wearing blue to the funeral. Black was hopeless and any other color was indecent. She also wore blue to Marian’s funeral, and so did Marian. She was astonished I didn’t remember this. I remembered Marian being buried in a pale pink dress. This was no surprise. My mother and I generally differ on all things concerning my dead sister.”

The fact that Adora would rather wear a more flattering color to the funeral reflects how she is more concerned with her own appearance than with expected behavior. This moment also reflects one of the deep chasms that exists between Camille and her mother: Marian’s death. Marian’s death remains a source of contention between Camille and her mother throughout the novel and will be the thing that separates them forever. 

“I hated being in Wind Gap, but home held no comfort either.”

Here, Camille admits that she doesn’t feel a sense of belonging anywhere she goes. This is because, as we will find out, she has never felt loved, nor has she made any lasting attachments in the form of healthy relationships. In this sense, Camille could be described as feeling emotionally homeless and unattached to the people around her. 

“I drank more vodka. There was nothing I wanted to do more than be unconscious again, wrapped in black, gone away. I was raw. I felt swollen with potential tears, like a water balloon filled to burst. Begging for a pin prick. Wind Gap was unhealthy for me. This home was unhealthy for me.”

This moment, like so many others throughout the novel, demonstrates Camille’s dependence on alcohol to escape her unhappiness. As we will find out later, Wind Gap is unhealthy for Camille because it’s filled with awful memories that she can’t escape, including being sexually abused by older boys, her sister’s untimely death, and her self-harming. Her home is unhealthy because of her mother, who will later admit that she never loved Camille. 

“Outside the porch I saw a changeling. A little girl with her face aimed intently at a huge, four-foot dollhouse, fashioned to look exactly like my mother’s home. Long blonde hair drifted in disciplined rivulets down her back, which was to me. As she turned, I realized it was the girl I’d spoken to at the edge of the woods, the girl who’d been laughing with her friends outside Natalie’s funeral. The prettiest one.”

This is the first time Camille sees Amma and realizes it’s her. Amma is described as a changeling—appearing to be a little girl at home but a scantily-clad teenager when away from home. While this description is purely physical, in later chapters we will see how Amma is also an emotional changeling, switching violently back and forth between nice and vindictive. 

“When I was in high school, Garrett Park was the place everyone met on weekends to drink beer or smoke pot or get jerked off three feet into the woods. It was where I was first kissed, at age thirteen, by a football player with a pack of chaw tucked down in his gums. The rush of the tobacco hit me more than the kiss; behind his car I vomited wine cooler with tiny, glowing slices of fruit.”

Again, one of Camille’s first sexual experiences is linked to alcohol and sickness, further demonstrating the origins of her unhealthy sense of sexuality. It’s also important to note that this kiss and drinking alcohol occurred at age thirteen, as so did Marian’s death and Camille’s first time cutting. 

“The Capisi home sat on the edge of the low-rent section to the far east of town, a cluster of broken-down, two-bedroom houses, most of whose inhabitants work at the nearby pig factory-farm, a private operation that delivers almost 2 percent of the country’s pork. Find a poor person in Wind Gap, and they’ll almost always tell you they work at the farm, and so did their old man.”

Like the description of Adora’s mansion in Chapter Two, this illustration of Wind Gap’s poverty reveals the socioeconomic divide that separates the town. While wealthy people like Adora have never worked a day in their life, Wind Gap’s poor work a in fetid and foul factory-farm environment, slaughtering the pigs, scalding their bodies, or cleaning the manure pits.

“I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words—cook, cupcake, kitty, curls—as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh.”

While this is the first time Camille admits that she has self-harmed, what’s interesting to note is her repetition of the phrase “you see,” which directly addresses the reader. Camille is painstakingly secretive about her scars, so much so that she wears long sleeves and pants even in the sweltering Missouri summer heat. Yet, here, she’s reemphasizing this idea of the reader seeing her scars. In this way, Camille is baring herself for the reader, something she only does one other time in the novel, for John Keene. 

“I was ten and writing every other word my teacher said on my jeans in blue ballpoint. I washed them, guiltily, secretly, in my bathroom sink with baby shampoo. The words smudged and blurred, left indigo hieroglyphics up and down the pant legs, as if a tiny ink-stained bird had hopped across them.”

Here, Camille admits that her obsession with holding onto words started before she began cutting them into her skin. While obsessively writing down words on her jeans could be a precursor to her cutting the words on her skin, it’s important to note that the physical act of cutting was directly correlated to the timing of her sister’s death and the sexual experiences with the older boys. 

“It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as to my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying rubbing alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky.”

Every time Camille used to cut, she nursed herself afterwards. Knowing that the only time Camille’s mother showed her love was when she was sick, an act that stopped after Marian died, Camille’s self-care could be viewed as her attempt to show herself the love that she wasn’t getting from her mother. 

“I didn’t mind the idea of spilling Wind Gap’s stories to Richard. I felt no particular allegiance to the town. This was the place my sister died, the place I started cutting myself. A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It’s the kind of place that leaves a mark.”

By saying that Wind Gap is the “kind of place that leaves a mark,” Camille is directly implicating the town as at least partly responsible for her scars—not just her physical scars, but her emotional scars as well. 

“By the time I could talk, they were married. I know almost nothing about my real father. The name on the birth certificate is fake: Newman Kennedy, for my mother’s favorite actor and president, respectively. She refused to tell me his true name, lest I hunt him down. No, I was to be considered Alan’s child. This was difficult, as she soon had Alan’s child, eight months after he married her.”

This moment reveals another facet of Adora’s selfishness as a mother. Rather than let Camille know her father’s identity, she would rather keep Camille isolated with Adora as the only parent. In this way, Adora has always had complete control over Camille. 

“My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past—or at least that’s what the shrinks at the clinic came up with. I’ve long since given up trying to discover anything about my dad; when I picture him, it’s as a generic ‘father’ image. I can’t stand to think about him too specifically, to imagine him shopping for groceries or having a cup of morning coffee, coming home to kids.”

This moment reveals why Camille feels a sense of homelessness no matter where she’s at. Because she was never loved by her mother and never knew her father, she constantly feels like a piece of herself is missing, as if she isn’t tethered to anyone or any place in her life. There is a tragedy in Camille’s longing here that represents how different her life could have been with her biological father in her life. 

“Most of the sows are repeatedly inseminated, brood after brood, till their bodies give way and they go to slaughter. But while they’re still useful, they’re made to nurse—strapped to their sides in a farrowing crate, legs apart, nipples exposed. Pigs are extremely smart, sociable creatures, and this forced assembly-line intimacy makes the nursing sows want to die. Which, as soon as they dry up, they do. Even the idea of this practice I find repulsive. But the sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. Like watching a rape and saying nothing.”

Camille’s sympathy for the sows comes from an affinity she feels with them. Knowing that Camille was essentially raped at the age of thirteen by older boys and repeatedly taken advantage of sexually, her linking the nursing sows with viewing rape reveals how she feels like she has been in similar situations. Like the sows, who are held down and used for their bodies, Camille was used for her body by the older boys. The fact that Camille says that the sows must want to die because of their treatment signifies Camille’s own longing to escape what was done to her. 

“Normally, Richard was the kind of guy I disliked, someone born and raised plush: looks, charm, smarts, probably money. These men were never very interesting to me; they had no edges, and they were usually cowards. They instinctively fled any situation that might cause them embarrassment or awkwardness. But Richard didn’t bore me. Maybe because his grin was a little crooked. Or because he made his living dealing with ugly things.”

Camille’s emphasis on being attracted to men with “edges” relates to her attraction to the pain of self-harm. Self-harm gives her a sense of pleasure and release, which, of course, is bad for her. In the same way, she seeks out relationships that inevitably cause her harm despite the pleasure. 

“I pulled my pants down just a little bit, kept my stomach covered with my shirt, kept him distracted with well-placed kisses. Then I guided him into me and we fucked, fully clothed, the crack on the leather couch scratching my ass. Trash, pump, little, girl. It was the first time I’d been with a man in ten years. Trash, pump, little, girl! His groaning was soon louder than my skin. Only then could I enjoy it. Those last few sweet thrusts.”

Despite having sex with Richard, Camille doesn’t let him get close enough to know her secret cutting. In this way, an act that should be supremely intimate is kept at a distance. This reveals Camille’s inability to get close to the people she cares about because she can’t trust them enough to be vulnerable. This moment also reveals just how haunted Camille is by her scars and her past. Instead of finding enjoyment through the act, her scars scream at her, representing a guilt and shame that has stayed with her all these years. 

“His hands ran all over me, and I let them: my back, my breasts, my thighs, my shoulders. His tongue in my mouth, down my neck, over my nipples, between my legs, then back to my mouth. Tasting myself on him. The words stayed quiet. I felt exorcised.”

This moment is the antithesis of Camille’s sexual experience with Richard. Here, for the first time, Camille lets another person see and touch her naked body. For the first time, she lets herself be completely vulnerable, and for the first time, the scars on her body remain quiet. This moment, however brief, symbolizes a turning point for Camille in that she has finally let someone else into her pain. Important to note is that she shares this moment with the much younger John Keene because he is the only person who could truly understand her pain, seeing as they both lost a younger sister.