The death of parents
The book centers around the life of a young girl who was embedded in a loving family until the parents each died, leaving her as an orphan. The irony of their deaths is that they leaves her disenfranchised. The mother dies eating a chicken, choking on a bone, which is ironic because by eating she was attempting to live, but instead, she died randomly without warning. For Eva, this is horrifying, because although the parents understand their mortality (she was conceived when the father thought he might be dying), Eva thought they were immortal or something.
The brothel
Because Eva doesn't understand the terrible aspects of life, sheltered by innocence and the love of her parents, she doesn't understand what is happening when her caretakers leave her to be raped by johns in a brothel. This brothel sequence underscores the horror of sexual abuse by showing the ironic loss of innocence. Because of innocence, she was most likely to be truly horrified by the act, without any framework to even understand sexuality in the first place. It was a spiritual horror that she endures.
Zulema
The wife of Halabi is named Zulema. She is an ironic person because she stays with her husband, even though he takes in young prostitutes as playthings. Eva is unable to make a way for herself in life, untrained as she is in life, and having been forced into prostitution against her will, this is simply an extension of that mistreatment. This means that she and Zulema are co-victims of an abuser, but when Zulema kills herself, the police blame Eva. This irony is a symbol for the irony of victim blaming.
Transgender life
When Eva stays with Mimi, she realizes that humans are more than meet the eye. Mimi lives her life as a woman, but she was born a man, which shows Eva through dramatic irony that sexuality is confounding to the human mind. Gender identity, sexual orientation, and monogamy/polygamy are all variations on a theme. Instead of merely procreating, humans use sex for all kinds of psychic reasons, and for Eva, that is helpful, because it helps begin her deconstruction.
The ironic journey of self
Eva has been used to having no will, so she must undergo a strange journey of becoming herself. This is ironic, because she is using sexual freedom to reconstruct a kind of innocence, but by choosing to have sex with whom she wants, she frees herself from the idea that sex must be against her will, that sex is a kind of torture that afflicts her. The journey out of commonly understood beliefs is one of freedom and healing, and as the novel portrays, the journey leads her back to a hopeful monogamy. She realizes that perhaps she has settled with someone who isn't right for her, but she is clearly hoping to settle, and that signals the end of this painful, irony journey.
