The narrator of this story, Charlene is a woman from a rural area in Virginia. Longing to leave her past behind, she heads to college in hopes of creating a new identity for herself. Charlene ends up engaging in a lot of social events with different boys with her friends. The culture at the time was that women went to college to find a husband. This is greatly enhanced when her friend, Melissa talks about how she wants to move in with her boyfriend and get pregnant. Throughout the story, Charlene is struggling to come to terms with who she is as a person as well as trying to fit in with her friends. In the end, she goes on to graduate school for writing after she starts accepting her past and writing about her hometown and her family, overcoming her own prejudices about where she came from.
Charlene is surrounded by college friends and hanging out with boys, even going so far as to hook up with one of her professors (disgusting). Despite all of this, she can be interpreted as a person who is grieving. Not necessarily for the death of someone but for the death of herself. By trying to cut off who she was and where she came from, she was isolating herself and it was affecting her work. As a result, she only writes about experiences that have never happened to her, ignoring her teacher’s advice to “write what you know.”
Part of her depression is reflected in how the way she sees her family. In the beginning, she states that she never knew how her parents got together and had her indicating that her family was probably a bit dysfunctional. This is also hinted at when she describes how when her mother would have her nervous breakdowns, her dad would send her mom to the hospital and she would be sent to stay with an aunt. With a dysfunctional family back home, she feels ashamed and detached from her family. In her grief, she tries to console herself by hooking up with her professor to feel relief from her pain. The professor though shuts their relationship down later as he is married and his wife is pregnant.
During the story, she makes up a character named “Bubba” who is supposed to be her cool, older brother who is a “bad boy” but also extremely smart. Through making up this character and building him up as a real person to her friends, she is venting her own personal feelings and desires onto this fictional character. Bubba is the person Charlene wants to be but cannot be due to her situation in life. This changes after her professor, Dr. Pierce, says that they cannot be together during the summer before her senior year. What also ends up happening is that Charlene stops projecting onto Bubba, going so far as to say he died while trying to save a child in a lake to her friends. By telling her friends that he is dead, she no longer has to go on lying. With her affair and Bubba behind her, she finally begins to reveal her true self in her writing which allows her to graduate college and go on to graduate school. However, she never told her friends that Bubba was not real, even after college.
This is nice:
Despite all of this, she can be interpreted as a person who is grieving. Not necessarily for the death of someone but for the death of herself. By trying to cut off who she was and where she came from, she was isolating herself and it was affecting her work. As a result, she only writes about experiences that have never happened to her, ignoring her teacher’s advice to “write what you know.”