or being her mother's shadow, and even with Astrid not having much to do with the
             initial plot of the novel, Fitch expresses her every thought perfectly, allowing us to have a better understanding and closer relationship with the book's narrator, "She wanted the shy blond, of course, way younger than her, who wanted to be a poet too. He was the one who came home with us."(5) Ingrid then fell in love with a man named Barry Kolker, broke her rule and when the relationship ended badly she became very bitter and demanded her revenge. Fitch took a drastic turn at this point in the novel. Ingrid became obsessed and psychotic, and after several torturous months, finally murdered Barry, which led to her incarceration which is the initial event that leads into the entire plot of the story.
             When Ingrid was taken away by the police Astrid went to live in a group home, "I came to live underground, in the house of sleep, in the house of plastic sheets and crying babies and brown roses in drifts" (41). While Astrid was living there Fitch showed us her first signs of instinct and personal development. The cutter girl she was sharing her room with had gone into her things, taken a page of her mother's writing and shoved it into her mouth. Astrid reacted violently, threw the girl onto the ground and held a knife to her spine as she told her to spit it out. "I wanted to cut her. I could feel the tip of the knife in her, slipping into her neck, the indentation at the base of her skull like a well." (43)
             Astrid then moves into a trailer with a woman named Starr (an ex hooker who found Jesus), her children and her carpenter boyfriend Ray, where she then delves further into self discovery. Ingrid comes back into play, crazier than before, when Astrid visits her in prison, "Prison agrees with me. There is no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everybody knows it." (59) During ...