How I Learned to Drive

Secrets are established as a motif from the first line of the play, when Li’l Bit tells the audience, “Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson” (9). How I Learned to Drive builds up to Li’l Bit’s telling that secret: that her Uncle Peck began molesting her when she was 11 years old. Li’l Bit has many secrets involving Peck. Peck tells Li’l Bit she “can’t tell anyone” (56) he lets her drive. When she’s 13, Li’l Bit suggests she and Peck get together once a week to talk, but she’ll “tell Mom [she’s] going to a girlfriend’s. To study” (47). Peck tells his nephew, Bobby, he won’t tell anyone Bobby was crying, saying, “I can keep secrets” (25). He also invites Bobby to “a secret place” (25), a “tree house where [Peck] used to stay for days” (25) and where they can have beer and crab salad, on the condition that Bobby doesn’t tell “anybody we’ve gone there—least of all your mom or your sisters” (25). Peck is simultaneously attractive and dangerous to children because of his ability to keep secrets. Though he appears kind to them, his secrets enable him to abuse them. 

Whether one hides or reveals one’s secrets seems to indicate whether or not one survives one’s trauma. Peck has his own secrets from the war; he is hesitant to speak to Li’l Bit of his time in World War II, and even his wife Aunt Mary says he does not discuss this subject with her. Ultimately, Peck drinks himself to death, having never overcome the pain of his past. In contrast, immediately after revealing her own trauma to the audience, Li’l Bit, in the final scene, floors the gas and drives off down the highway, moving on both literally and figuratively.