55 pages • 1 hour read
Monique TruongBitter in the Mouth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Confession: … August 3, 1998”
Chapter 10 Summary
Linda craves words, and although the same incomings are produced if she says the word herself, there is always a difference when someone else says it, like “the difference between being served a good meal and having to cook one” one oneself (102). College is challenging for her because new words and incomings are always startling: “In my classes, I often had the shakes and exhibited what appeared to be a mild form of Tourette’s,” leading to rumors that she takes speed and never sleeps (102-3).
Baby Harper told Linda that her mother was never young, that she “was born a thirty-five-year-old woman and remained that age until she turned thirty-six, and then she got older like the rest of us” (103). From 7 to 11, Linda loved DeAnne “because that was what I thought was natural” (104). At 11, however, DeAnne hires Bobby, whom she lusts after, and thus finds reasons to ignore the evidence after he rapes Linda. Linda spends much of her youth trying to figure out why Thomas married DeAnne. Baby Harper tries to explain, in part through his photographs, but Linda struggles still to understand, seeing only an awkward, loveless match.
Chapter 11 Summary
Linda employs a mnemonic device similar to the Greek memory palace or memory path, only “instead of a path there was a multicourse meal prepared by a mad scientist who knew and cared nothing about food” (115). As a result, and in part because of her synesthesia, her memory is very strong. However, there is a memory she still struggles to recover, one of her earliest, of a trailer home on fire which “might not have existed” (116).
Linda is back in the memory of the night she and Harper confessed their secrets to one another, for Linda meaning the secret of her rape. Her tale is straightforward and factual, as she “thought that the best way to deliver bad news was to deliver bad news” rather than “wrapped in asides or separated by deep breaths” (116). After Bobby had raped her, Linda had asked Kelly why he had treated her differently—i.e., why was forced touching not enough. Kelly told Linda not to tell anyone.
That night, they celebrated her father’s birthday; the next morning, Linda found a new purse, a box of pads, and her freshly cleaned underwear. Linda had tried to throw the bloodied underwear away, but “this and other moments in [her] life have taught [her] that the trash was where you placed what you wanted to be found, whether you knew it or not” (118). Shortly after his crime, Bobby died in a fatal car crash: “The thing about fate was that it often looked like the handiwork of a vengeful God” (118).
Harper asked Linda why she never told anyone: “The crime for him (and me) wasn’t the loss of my virginity. […] The crime was the taking away of my right to choose” (120). Part of Harper’s grief, Linda believes, is that he “mourned that there was a part of my life that I had kept from him” and realized that it likely wasn’t the only one (120). That night, the two of them drive to the graveyard and paint the word “RAPIST” in red on Bobby’s gravestone. The next morning, Linda leaves for Yale.
Chapter 12 Summary
Linda’s father died the year before she left for Yale. His estranged family send a small jade plant in a wicker basket to the funeral in lieu of their absence, meant as an insult (126). Afterwards, DeAnne and Linda struggle to do basic things for themselves—locking the doors at night, taking out the trash. The day of the funeral, DeAnne forgets to zip up her dress, which Linda can’t believe; Harper points out, though, that she didn’t forget—she’s just always had someone to do it for her.
Thomas was found in his car parked outside of his mistress’s house, his young secretary. News travels fast, and within three days, Linda receives a letter from Kelly regarding the events, including the details, which had thus far been kept from her. Kelly and Linda’s correspondence had tapered off while Kelly was in South Carolina, but following the funeral, it picks back up again. She shares with Linda news of the baby; however, the one thing she won’t tell Linda is the father of the baby, choosing instead to tell her that she doesn’t know, which Linda doesn’t believe. Linda, in turn, chooses not to discuss her trepidation over getting into Yale.
Once Kelly’s baby, Luke—secretly nicknamed “Lil’ Skywalker,” after the Star Wars character—turns one, and once Kelly has regained her figure, Kelly is asked to leave South Carolina and move back to Boiling Springs, with the arrangement that she will keep in regular contact with Kelly in order to tell her about Luke, but Kelly isn’t to contact them, and she will only tell Luke about Kelly if he asks, which has yet to happen. Her aunt had already been the black sheep of the family, so it is a relief to the rest of the family when she stops showing up to events, “as the family embarrassment was now harboring another family embarrassment. Two disappearances for the price of one” (137).
Linda is frustrated by the lengthy letter, no. 822, because it mostly discusses Luke and makes very little mention of Thomas’s passing. Harper helps Linda understand, however, that Kelly’s implied message was that “Life trumps death”: “Kelly, the new mother, understood that what had happened to me would happen to her baby much too soon. Because what difference was there between death and absence to the ones who were left behind?” (139).
Chapter 13 Summary
Linda begins the chapter with the story of the slave George Moses Horton. As a child, his mother had found comfort in prayer and taught Christian prayers and hymns to George, who eventually began to move the words around and create his own poems in his head. He didn’t tell anyone about his poems because he knew that they would belong to his master. However, while working for him at the market one day, he accidentally let slip a poem he had written, along with the admission that he had written it.
Baby Harper takes his first flight when he travels to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1990, in order to attend Linda’s commencement ceremony at Yale; he had thought about driving, “but then he decided that he wanted to experience the journey as [Linda] had experienced it” (142). Linda no longer spoke to her mother at that point and rarely returned to Boiling Springs, and not at all after Iris’s death, but she and Harper had continued to speak on the phone every week, and he is the only one to attend her graduation.
Although Harper is excited for her graduation, Linda is less so, as she wants “no part in this final indoctrination” into their “special, lifelong status as Yalies” (150). Linda discards the long list of ceremonies and chooses not to tell Harper about them, knowing he would want to attend all of them. As a result, Linda doesn’t see Baby Harper until Monday afternoon, the day of her graduation, for the final event, the smaller presentation of diplomas in her residential college. She leads him to a seat she saved for him in the front row, then puts on her cap and gown and joins the rest of the students. It’s only when she hears her name called—“Linh-Dao Nguyen Hammerick”—that she notices Baby Harper is uncharacteristically not taking any photographs.
Part 1, Chapters 10-13 Analysis
These chapters deepen the novel’s engagement with conceptions of love. On the one hand, Linda and Harper become ever-more acquainted, and the depths of his anguish at Linda’s revelation regarding Bobby stand in stark contrast to DeAnne’s reaction, although it is never made clear that Linda told DeAnne in such certain terms. On the other, Linda distinguishes between love based on obligation and convention, and love based on emotion and desire. Linda’s relationship with her mother falls into the former camp—hence, that she loved her mother from 7 through 11 years old, which we soon learn encompasses the first four or five years she even knew DeAnne, because she believed she was supposed to, so she did. There is a convention at work here: It is expected that mothers love their children and vice-versa, but this expectation is bound by certain rules, particularly on the part of the caregiver. DeAnne transgresses the agreement when she allows Linda to be raped by Bobby, even if the initial act was allowed unintentionally; this snaps Linda out of the “contract,” from which point she is no longer obligated to love her mother (and, therefore, does not).
The narrative structure of the novel plays with memory, as well. Linda does not tell her story in a straightforward, conventional manner, working from start to finish; she weaves in and out of memories, tying things together that might initially seem unrelated but work together to develop an idea that might eventually explain a moment or event. There’s a general sense of forward movement, but like with the North Carolinian mythologies, Linda the narrator is in no rush to get there, preferring to wade through the experience and help us take it in. This is reminiscent of Linda’s own experience with memory, as she discusses in these chapters, as well. She experiences language differently—this can be a burden, as it is when she initially arrives at Yale and is bombarded with unfamiliar words along with their brand-new incomings, but it can also be a blessing, as she learns how to negotiate memory through experience. Even this, though, is unique to her because it relies on her own personal understanding of taste as it relates to language: As the Greeks used a walking path, she tells us, she uses a feast that makes no sense to anyone but her.
It is one more significant form of foreshadowing that the final chapter of Part 1 begins with a piece of George Moses’s story as it is the story that deals most explicitly with racial oppression as it relates to invisibility. As Linda notes earlier in the book, George’s story is the only place where the book acknowledges slavery despite that slavery is intertwined with North Carolina history—and, in a way that is inextricably related to Thomas’s own life given that his family made their initial fortune as slaveowners. What is not explicitly stated in the novel, though, is the role poetry—and literacy—played in the philosophy of slavery.
Slavery as an institution was often justified by claiming that Africans were naturally less intelligent than whites through rather circular means: Slaves were typically forbidden from learning how to read or write, then their illiteracy was used as evidence that they were less intelligent. One of the earliest American poets, the 18th-century African American poet Phillis Wheatley, was therefore used by abolitionists to counter this claim. The fact that Linda zeros in on the slave poet George Moses, therefore, is significant because it is a story that emphasizes racial oppression and is about a man who undermined society’s beliefs about him—and who was nevertheless still oppressed out of spite.
