Summary

The chapter starts in the first person with Dixie Dupree as the narrator. She begins the novel with a discussion of her diary and what it has meant to her over the past events of her life. Dixie roughly and vaguely begins to outline the series of events that brought her to this point of turning in her diary to Mr. Evans, a prosecutor. She describes how her mother had given her the diary three years prior on her eighth birthday, and how it had been so precious to her she had kept the key on a necklace around her neck.

Dixie outlines her fraught relationship with her mother, her parents’ break-up, her father’s actions that “sealed our fate,” the appearance of Uncle Ray in her family, and her older brother AJ who tries to be helpful with mixed results (24). She strongly hints...