Bullying
One of the central themes of the book is bullying and the way in which it can shape a person's life for the rest of their life despite the fact that it was something the was endured for a relatively short period of time. Although Elaine is eventually able to remove herself from the group of so-called friends who bully her, and to make other friends who treat her kindly and with respect, she is not able to extricate herself from the influence of the bullying quite so easily. In her mind Cordelia was built up into far more of an ogre than she actually was and when the two meet again it is the victim of the bullying and not the bully who is the stronger of the two.
The bullying from her friends has shaped Elaine as an adult and has also been greatly influential on her work. It is the barometer by which we can judge her growth as a person, from socially awkward teen who does not read social cues at all to strong, thicker-skinned young woman who is capable of behaving in the same bullying way that her tormentor did, but chooses not to.
An interesting aspect of the theme is the way in which the victim of bullying, Elaine, constantly wants to re-write her experience of her bully, Cordelia; she tries at many different stages of their lives to re-connect in an effort to restore a balance of equality to a relationship that essentially still bothers her.
A Search for Identity
The main characters in the novel, Elaine and Cordelia, are the most obviously searching for their identity, although it could equally be said that Grace and Carole are also doing the same because they do not have a strong enough idea of what they are like themselves to stand independently of the sly new addition Cordelia when she influences the way in which they act towards someone they had previously considered a friend. They are weak in character because they allow themselves to be swept away in the bullying rather than being true to the friendship that they offered before.
Elaine is always trying to find out who she is as a person because her parents have not really given her a framework that would enable her to find out. He life has been peripatetic and she rarely gets to put down roots for any length of time. This has made it difficult for her to learn social niceties and cues or to find out how she feels about most people or places. She uses others and their reactions to her as a way of finding out who she really is and does not find herself until she comes to terms with her friends' abandonment of her.
Cordelia seems strong and confident when we first meet her but it becomes apparent that she is constantly searching for an identity that she never finds and in doing so she actually loses her mind and unravels emotionally.
Mental Health
Cordelia is a mentally and emotionally damaged girl which is evident in her bullying of Elaine and the way in which she feels compelled to turn her friends against her. As the novel progresses her mental state gets worse. She is fading away in herself in high school, but despite seeming to regroup emotionally afterwards, starts to act out and finally is committed to a mental hospital by her parents.
Childhood Framework and Structure
The importance of a structured childhood with a framework for learning and understanding how social cues work and how we interact with others is one of the themes in the novel. This is largely because these are things that Elaine never had and until she is able to attend school she is actually quite lonely because she never gets to make any friends of her own age. Her parents travel and take her with them, but she knows nobody on the trip and all it serves to do is remove her from her friends and her peers. A defined structure or framework in early childhood would certainly have made navigating life a great deal easier for Elaine.
