55 pages • 1 hour read
Bitter in the Mouth
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Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Confession: … August 3, 1998”
Chapter 1 Summary
Linda begins her narrative with her relationship with her great-uncle, Baby Harper, her “first love” at seven years old (3); she tells the reader that “a family narrative should begin with love” (4). She then states some basic facts about herself: Her name is Linda; she grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where her best friend was named Kelly; her parents were Thomas and DeAnne; and she now lives in New York City (4). However, she explains that “once these cards have been thrown down, there are bound to be distorting overlaps” (4).
Linda’s grandmother Iris, Baby Harper’s older sister, died on February 14th, 1987, and the fact that “she had never told a lie” had kept the family together (4). There had been several false starts prior to that. On her deathbed, Iris had told Linda, “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two,” to which she responded “Bitch” and was made to leave the room (5). A month after Iris passed, Linda cried in her grief, realizing that if she had stayed longer, her grandmother might have had more to say to her and revealed secrets which Linda needed to know.
At Yale, where Linda went to college, she “would gravitate toward classes with the word ‘dysfunction’ featured prominently in the title” in recognition of her own family dysfunction (5). Linda loved her mother “from the age of seven to eleven” (5); she was fonder of her father, but her father died young, even before her grandmother.
Baby Harper had been a librarian at Gardner-Webb Baptist College, and although he was a good librarian, he maintained his own esoteric filing system at home, categorizing his books by alphabetical descriptors rather than author or title. He handled Iris’s funeral arrangements; his own were categorized in a folder titled “The End.” Iris had grown diabetic after her husband passed—she had maintained her appearances strictly until then, at which point she succumbed to her love of sweets.
Chapter 2 Summary
Linda has synesthesia, so her “first memory was a taste,” which she kept for most of her life “not as a mystery, which it still is, but as a secret” (15). Some words bring no taste with them, but the rest of her “vocabulary was populated by an order of monks who had broken their vows of silence” with “what they last placed in their mouths” (15). Linda calls these tastes “incomings.”
When Linda first moved to New York City, she wrote to her best friend, Kelly, that she’d made a mistake; even after the advent of email, the two continued a correspondence, relying “on carefully written letters to keep each other informed of our inner lives” (16). Kelly had begun the correspondence and friendship with a random letter, sent in 1975 when the two were only seven, to which Thomas had helped Linda respond. Thomas had been surprised by how Linda had answered the first question Kelly had asked her, her favorite color—Linda had replied that her favorite color was “fire,” as she likes “red and yellow and orange and blue”; she notes that another child might have called that a “rainbow,” but she “had never seen a rainbow in real life” (17).
Kelly had replied to Linda’s assertion by reminding her that she had made the real mistake by staying in Boiling Springs, that mistakes are “now a habit I can’t kick,” referencing a Dolly Parton song (18). The two had grown up idolizing Dolly Parton, who “was a beautiful mystery” to them (18). When DeAnne had found their “hagiography” to “DP,” she had told them that she was trashy; the girls only understood trashy as “a thing that is thrown away for no good reason, as in undervalued,” and thereby vowed to themselves to be trashy (19). Kelly had kept her promise by turning herself into a stereotypical, skinny popular-girl type just before high school.
Linda had never been a strong student due to her incomings, as she had always struggled to concentrate in class. Linda’s pre-high school transformation involved taking up smoking; this dulled her sense of taste and allowed her to pay attention in class, ultimately resulting in her becoming the class valedictorian. Kelly and Linda continued writing to one another throughout high school, which becomes particularly important because Kelly has become one of the popular kids, and “open displays of cross-clique interactions weren’t understood or condoned” at their school (23). Linda initially hid her smoking habit in the bathroom, but then began hanging out with the other “stoners” in the designated smoking area.
Kelly eventually got pregnant, moving away to Rock Hill, South Carolina to hide the pregnancy and live with her aunt; she dropped out of high school, earned her GED, and enrolled in Gardner-Webb back in Boiling Springs, although after Linda had already left for Yale. Linda had been the only person other than Kelly’s family to know of her pregnancy, which was their fifth secret together.
Chapter 3 Summary
Linda thought of her father, Thomas, as the epitome of the Reasonable Man, a legal standard “once evoked with much frequency by the courts to weigh the actions or inactions of the rest of us” (27). Linda compares the Reasonable Man to the modern “What Would Jesus Do,” noting that the Reasonable Man and Jesus are similar in many, but not all, ways.
When Linda was 11, she saw her father as Atticus Finch and became enamored with To Kill a Mockingbird. This eventually grew into a crush on Dill, a character in the novel, which allowed Kelly to admit that she had a crush on Wade, Linda’s real-life neighbor. Linda and Wade had known each other since Linda was young and had been close; however, once Kelly called “dibs,” Wade became off-limits to her.
In the South, Linda tells us, most reprimands boil down to selfishness. The word selfish, however, brought with it “the taste of end-of-the-summer corn on the cob,” which made it welcome, particularly as an antidote to her mother’s cooking, which was not very good (34). DeAnne mostly cooked strange casseroles; Linda has “since learned that foods named for the pot or pan that they were cooked in probably had little else going for them” (35).
The only boy they had discussed before Wade and Dill was Kelly’s cousin, Bobby, who was in high school at the time that they were in fifth grade, and who mowed the lawn for Kelly’s parents. Bobby would make Kelly touch his genitals when they were alone, which the two recognized as wrong, but were too young to fully know what to do about it. Beth Anne, Kelly’s mother, used to get her hair done while Bobby mowed the lawn. To avoid Bobby, Kelly began going to Linda’s, which solved the problem until DeAnne began hiring him to mow their lawn, where he continued his predation: By the end of the next summer, “Kelly’s cousin was no longer a boy. He was a monster. He was a menace. […] He wasn’t how we had imagined the boys in our lives to be. Forced hands, eyes shut, blood” (36).
Chapter 4 Summary
The night before Linda leaves for Yale, she decides to tell Baby Harper about why she hates her mother. They have their usual Saturday-night dinner at Bridges, a local barbecue restaurant. Baby Harper was the family’s photographer; over the course of his life, he filled more than 100 photo albums, although he rarely appeared in the photographs himself. Many of the earlier albums are filled with candid shots, but later albums give way to prepared shots, as insisted upon by Iris.
When Harper initially asks where DeAnne is, Linda tells him only that she is a witch. Later that night, however, Linda tells him the truth about DeAnne and Bobby. After some grief and consolation, Harper tells her about how he treated her initially. Harper was only eight when DeAnne was born, and for eight years he passed her hateful notes which would be smudged by the time Iris read them. When DeAnne turned eight, however, he stopped because he “knew that if he continued to despise DeAnne for simply being […] he would be committing an even greater sin than he had bargained for” (47).
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The novel revels in its secrets. We learn about Linda’s main secret—her synesthesia—rather early on; she maintains that secret from everyone, except for Kelly, until the end of the novel. We are privy to this detail from the start because it is key to understanding Linda’s relationship with language and the world around her and to understanding the narration, which is peppered with tastes. This structure is particularly interesting as much as it is difficult to penetrate—whenever there is dialogue, the reader must fight through tastes appended to many words, which mirrors Linda’s experience, but nevertheless initially places a lot of work on the reader. Reading the novel becomes akin to learning a new language—or, at least, a new dialect of a language—as we grow accustomed to the experience.
Other secrets, however, are hinted at but not revealed until later. For example, we understand that Baby Harper is different from the rest of his family—not shunned but certainly unique, with habits that set him apart, and we know that he is a flamboyant “confirmed bachelor” at this point. So, although Linda doesn’t explicitly state it until much later, Harper is described in a way such that his homosexuality is coded into his characterization—which, again, likely mirrors Harper’s experience as a man who kept his sexuality quiet due to his circumstances, even if it was an open kind of secret. Likewise, we don’t learn immediately the extent of Bobby’s actions—or his end—but we know he is a monster who commits a horrific sexual act, so we don’t need Linda to spell out that Bobby raped her.
On the other hand, Linda’s background and ethnicity—i.e., the fact that Linda is a Vietnamese refugee adopted by Thomas and DeAnne at seven—are kept rather closely guarded throughout Part 1 of the novel. This reveal is foreshadowed in some ways—e.g., we understand that there is also something different about Linda, something that separates her from the rest of her family, and Linda never mentions anything from before she was seven years old—but these moments are so subtle and smooth that, in conjunction with the first-person perspective of the novel, it’s easy to write those moments off as quirks of the narrative rather than hints of a big reveal. Much of the first part of the novel reads differently once this information is known, though—e.g., the jade flower sent as an insult following Thomas’s funeral; Linda’s loneliness and segregation, which initially read simply as the result of being a bookish child; DeAnne’s coldness toward her only daughter, who, as it turns out, was adopted without DeAnne’s input from DeAnne’s husband’s true love.
Relatedly, knowing this also makes Linda’s relationship with Kelly simultaneously clearer and more complex. For example, it’s easy to initially write off Kelly’s first letter as the impulse of a precocious child, and as coincidence that their parents worked together. However, the act reads differently when one considers that Kelly’s father certainly would have been aware that his boss had just taken the extraordinary step of adopting a recently orphaned child who also happened to be a Vietnamese refugee post-Vietnam War. Still, the motif of letter-writing is established in Chapter 2 and continued throughout the book; time is often established through the specific letter-number in which a conversation takes place, and memories and events are often framed and discussed by specific letters. As noted below, letter-writing serves as a metaphor for tradition—Kelly and Linda maintain their letter-writing tradition in the face of faster-paced email, but they also maintain their friendship through letters even when their in-person friendship falters. However, it also works to establish exposition in a novel that plays fast and loose with narrative conventions.
Love as a concept—and, relatedly, the concept of family—is also complicated in these early chapters. For example, Linda describes her great-uncle Harper as her first love in borderline romantic terms. Opening the novel with this confession serves both to complicate what it means to love and to engage in taboo and shock to ground those explorations in conceptions of what is acceptable or conventional and what is not. Of course, Linda is not actually trying to suggest that she was in love with Harper; rather, we see how our relationships, from a young age, shape who we become and who we seek out. Linda states that she is “not ashamed to admit that I have tried to find him in the male bodies that I lie next to” (3), but the point here is to blur the line between conceptions of love and to demonstrate that what Harper taught her, and what she enjoyed about her relationship with her great-uncle, are things that stuck with her and that she sought out in future relationships, ones that, it is worth noting, she separated from romantic love, as well.
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