Mental Health

The novel explores issues of mental health in order to show that Black characters can experience mental health issues just as much as anyone else, even if they are routinely undiagnosed. Ashley begins the novel as a girl who is deeply uncomfortable discussing tough topics. She lives most of her life in a thoughtless and vapid manner, and she has difficult being self-aware. However, we get hints early on in the novel that Ashley feels a deep sense of loneliness that might border on depression: “I can’t tell if loneliness is being Black, or being young, or being a girl, or if Lucia’s right and I need new friends. I don’t know. “It might be lonelier / Without the loneliness,” Emily wrote. And she was white as shit” (124). Later on in the novel, Ashley considers her relationship with her cousin Morgan, who resents...