Charlie Davis’s story is the story of over two million young women in the United States. The author says to any self-harmers reading her book: It is a coping mechanism: “It means that you occupy a small space in the very real and very large canyon of people who suffer from depression or mental illness.” She emphasizes that self-harm is not a grab for attention. It’s my guess that you know someone, right now, who self-harms.” It’s important to remember, though, that these statistics only come from what’s reported, and they don’t account for the increasing percentage of boys who self-harm. “It’s estimated that one in every two hundred girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen self-harms. Girls who write their pain on their bodies.” She reports: As she has one of the characters argue, “People should know about us. In an Afterword, the author writes about the real world of cutting. But Charlie is a character you can’t help rooting for, who has a survival instinct that helps her keep pushing forward. The author herself was a cutter, and she knows, and conveys, that there will always be struggling, and recovering. But oddly enough, this is an uplifting book, and not because of any easy out. You may be thinking, I can’t read this, it would be too hard. And sometimes she slips.Ĭolorful Fourth Avenue in Tucson, scene of much of the action in the book Charlie has to work hard to stay ahead of old comfortable ways of dealing with pain and setbacks. There is much more pain ahead for her in Tucson, but also friendship, redemption, and hope. Her mother doesn’t want her, but gives her money for a bus to Tucson, where Charlie’s friend Mikey lives. She explains, “I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.” It hurts, she says, but “when the blood comes, everything is warmer, and calmer.”Įventually, because she has no money, she is discharged from the safety of the psychiatric center. Cut out the man in the underpass, cut out Fucking Frank, the men downstairs the people on the street with too many people inside them, cut out hungry, and sad and tired, and being nobody and unpretty and unloved, just cut it all out, get smaller and smaller until I was nothing.” Wash, rinse, fucking repeat.”Ĭharlie initially cut herself to make herself and her bad thoughts disappear: “…the fucked-up part is once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed, inside and out. But the “treatment” unfortunately spirals into more bad feelings. When the bad feelings build so much a person can’t deal with them, he or she starts cutting. Such hurt can come from many things, such as sexual, physical, verbal, or emotional mistreatment. As this novel opens, seventeen-year-old Charlotte (“Charlie”) Davis is waking up in the self-harm unit of a hospital, and thereafter gets transferred to a psychiatric facility.Ĭharlie is a girl who cuts herself, because, as her doctor says, she has internalized abuse and blames and punishes herself for the painfulness of her life.
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