Bitter in the Mouth

Summarize Fact Check

Linda is the main character of the novel. She is a New York lawyer who grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and she has a form of synesthesia that causes her to taste words when she hears them. Part one of the book, “Confession,” focuses heavily on her childhood, with details about her adult life interspersed. Linda tells the story of her best friend Kelly, her next door neighbor Wade, and her rapist, Kelly’s cousin Bobby. She also reflects on her close relationship with her great-uncle, whom she and most other people call Baby Harper, as well as her relationship with her mother DeAnne and her father Thomas. It is made clear that Linda’s childhood was traumatic in several ways. In part two of the book, “Revelation,” we learn more about her long-term relationship with Leo, which is only briefly mentioned in the first half of the novel. She also has to grapple with the death of Baby Harper and the prospect of returning to Boiling Springs.

Linda’s Vietnamese roots are not revealed until the very last scene of “Confession,” when she is graduating from Yale and they call out her birth name: Linh-Dao Nguyen. At this point, several pieces of the puzzle that is Linda’s life fall into place for the reader, and throughout the second half of the novel she directly addresses the problems she faced as a Southerner who looked different than people thought she should.

Kelly is Linda's best friend from childhood. They begin exchanging letters when they are children, and they continue to do so even after Linda moves out of Boiling Springs. The two bond quickly because of their mutual obsession with Dolly Parton—which they swear to tell no one about—and the fact that they live on the same street. Linda reveals her synesthesia to Kelly when they are young, which shows how deeply Linda trusts her. Kelly and Linda both experience sexual abuse at the hands of Kelly's male cousin, Bobby. The two also share a childhood crush, a boy named Wade. Linda eventually dates Wade, although she conceals it from Kelly. When Kelly is a teenager, she becomes pregnant and leaves town, only revealing the father of the child—the pair's shared childhood crush, Wade—when Linda returns to Boiling Springs as an adult. Although they had grown apart since Linda moved to New York, they become closer again when she returns to Boiling Springs after the death of Baby Harper.

Harper is Linda's uncle. She considers him to be her "first love", and he is the member of her family with whom she has the closest relationship. He is a mentor, confidante, and parental figure for Linda. Baby Harper is a photographer and has a collection of photo albums he calls H.E.B.'s, which are filled with photos of everyone but himself. While she is living in New York City, Linda receives photo albums from Baby Harper that contain photos of him dressing up as a woman. Baby Harper was closeted for a long time and would always be the one taking the photos rather than being in them, so this is a very important moment in his character arc. Linda describes that Baby Harper wishes he "would have inhabited a body different from the one that God gave him."^[1] In a reflection of his dislike of his body, Baby Harper did not look at himself in the mirror, having only one small mirror in his Greek Revival house. Harper is closeted for most of the novel, but reveals to his family that he is gay when he begins seeing Boiling Springs's funeral director, Cecil. When he and Cecil die suddenly in a plane crash, Linda returns to Boiling Springs and is able to come to terms with his death.

DeAnne is Linda's adopted mother. She has trouble accepting Linda as her own child. The two are estranged for most of the novel because Linda believes that Deanne knew of her rape but did nothing about it. By the end of the novel, DeAnne reveals the story of Linda's adoption, and the reasoning for her difficulty accepting Linda becomes more clear.

Thomas is Linda's adopted father who corresponds with her Vietnamese mother Mai-Dao after she leaves him to go back to her fiancé in Vietnam. Thomas takes Linda in after writing her mother and learning of the conditions in Vietnam over a period of years during the war. He is also the one who gives Linda a book on the history of North Carolina that she often comes back to reference throughout her story.

Iris is Linda's grandmother, Baby Harper's older sister, and DeAnne's mother. She died in 1987. Iris was known for never telling a lie, which fearfully kept the family together. Iris and Linda did not have a close or loving relationship.

Other characters in the novel include Linda's neighbor and childhood-crush Wade and longtime boyfriend Leopold "Leo" Thomas Benton.

Summarize Top Qs Fact Check

Bitter in the Mouth is a story told nonlinearly. The reader is given pieces of the puzzle of Linda’s life, slowly accumulating information until the whole picture can be seen. The novel opens with an epigraph from To Kill a Mockingbird, immediately followed by the title of the first half of the novel—“Confession”—which focuses most heavily on Linda’s childhood. The opening scene introduces Baby Harper, Linda’s beloved uncle. Then Linda recalls the death of her grandmother, Iris. Linda is haunted by the words her grandmother spoke while on her deathbed: “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two.” In response to this, Linda simply says, "Bitch," a reflection of her tumultuous relationship with Iris that is later revealed to be rooted in Linda's ethnicity. Shortly after, Linda explains her form of synesthesia: she can taste words, both when she says them and when other people say them.

We are then introduced to her best friend, Kelly. She and Kelly are neighbors, and become friends after Kelly sends Linda a letter welcoming her to the neighborhood. Kelly is the only person that she tells about her synesthesia. They devise a plan together for Linda to smoke so that the “incomings”—the tastes she senses—are stifled in order for Linda to focus in school. The two share a childhood crush; they both like a boy named Wade, but Kelly calls “dibs” on him so Linda is unable to talk about her feelings toward Wade. Linda and Kelly are also both sexually assaulted by the same person: Kelly’s cousin, Bobby. Kelly’s encounters with Bobby are known fairly early, but Linda reveals the details of her rape slowly as the novel progresses.

Linda has an extremely close relationship with her uncle, Baby Harper; he acts as a parental figure for her. Linda talks about her uncle’s passion for photography, but he is never in any of the photos himself. He collects his photos in albums that he labels H.E.B.’s, his initials. Linda then goes into detail describing what Baby Harper told her about her father’s family.

Wade is then brought into the novel through his conversations with Linda at the bus stop. Immediately after, the reader is alerted to the fact that adult Linda was in an 8-year relationship with a man named Leo whom she never told about her synesthesia, a fact that alerts the reader to the state of their relationship. There are also more hints about her rape at the hands of Kelly’s cousin, but the full story still isn’t revealed.

Linda then talks about the relationship that develops between her and Wade. They begin dating in secret; Linda knows she can’t tell Kelly, and says that her friendship with Kelly matters a lot more than a boy. Eventually, Wade asks Linda to have sex with him, but then Bobby “enters the room”—trauma from her rape haunts her, and she tells Wade no. Their relationship ends and he moves away.

It is then revealed that Linda once tried to tell her mother about her synesthesia, but her mother told her that she wouldn’t tolerate craziness in her family. This is a nod toward Linda’s adoption, which had not yet been addressed—the statement meant that if Linda wanted to be accepted into DeAnne’s family, she couldn’t step out of line.

We then come to learn the intimate details of Linda’s rape as she tells them to Baby Harper. Bobby would mow the lawn of Linda’s house, and DeAnne flirted with him constantly. One day, when DeAnne left, Bobby asked to use the bathroom, and when Linda let him in he raped her. She was left with bruises on her neck and thighs. It is understood that her mother knew what happened, but instead of being there for Linda, she pretended that her daughter had gotten her period. Then, before Bobby was going to come back to mow again, he died. He crashed his car into a telephone pole, his head went through the windshield, and DeAnne went to the funeral. When Linda told Baby Harper the story, he got red paint and they went to the cemetery together. There, they each painted the word “rapist” on a side of the headstone. After learning about her rape, we also learn about the death of Linda’s father, Thomas. He died in his car in the driveway of his young secretary, whom he was having an affair with.

The next big event in the novel is when Kelly gets pregnant. She goes away for the duration of her pregnancy, and her aunt adopts her child. The father of the baby isn’t revealed until late in the novel.

The first section of the novel ends with Baby Harper coming to Linda’s graduation from Yale. As she walks across the stage and her name is read, her Vietnamese background is revealed; her full name is Lihn-Dao Nguyen Hammerick. Up to this point in the novel, her Vietnamese heritage is alluded to but never explicitly stated.

The second part of the novel is called “Revelation,” and focuses more heavily on Linda’s adult life (though both parts of the novel are nonlinear, so we continue to learn details about Linda’s childhood in this part as well). The fact that Linda was adopted is stated clearly. Linda recalls a time that she accused her grandmother of disliking her; Iris simply said that didn’t stop her from being Linda’s grandmother.

The novel then jumps forward, and Linda reflects on when she found out she had ovarian cancer. She went into the doctor at the request of Leo, her long-term boyfriend turned fiance. Leo wanted children, and when he found out Linda couldn’t have any, he immediately moved out of their shared house and left her. Linda then reveals their backstory.

Adult Linda lives in New York City and works as an attorney at a law firm. While she’s in New York, she stays in communication with her uncle, Baby Harper. He sends her four of his H.E.B.’s, but it isn’t explained what’s in them until later. At this point, Baby Harper has come out to his family as gay—something that Linda suspected for a long time, but he never said to anyone outright—and is with a man named Cecil, who has a funeral home. The two travel together, and Linda receives updates on their travels. One day, Linda gets a call from her mother, and she finds out that Baby Harper and Cecil have died in a plane crash. When Linda finally works up the nerve to tell Leo, instead of simply comforting her and going back to Boiling Springs as she asked him to, he proposes. Linda says yes, even though she doesn’t love him. Shortly after, the contents of the photo albums are revealed to the reader: it’s a series of photos Baby Harper took of himself dressed in women’s clothing. The photos start with him as a teenager and slowly become more curated and sophisticated as time passes.

Linda goes home six months after Baby Harper’s death. She sees Kelly again, who is staying in Baby Harper’s house. She and her mother work on their relationship; she shows DeAnne a PBS program about synesthesia that she herself watched, hoping that her mother would understand. DeAnne watched the program four times, a sign that she wants to heal her broken relationship with her daughter. Cecil’s nephew and his partner take over Cecil’s funeral home, and Kelly is asked to live in Baby Harper’s house permanently. Then Kelly tells Linda that Wade is the father, and Linda asks if Kelly knew about her relationship with Wade. Each woman already knew about the other’s secret.

The novel ends with the story of Linda’s early childhood. Her mother tells her all the details. Thomas, Linda’s father, met a woman named Mai-Dao when he was in New York City for law school. He fell in love with her, but Mai-Dao went back to Vietnam and married the man she’d been engaged to. They kept in touch by writing each other letters. Mai-Dao eventually moved into a trailer in Chapel Hill with her husband, Khanh. During this time, bad things were happening in Vietnam, and they were scared for their family there. Thomas offered his help, and Khanh found out and was very unhappy. Then, their trailer burned down, and Linda’s biological parents died. Thomas immediately drove to Chapel Hill and took Linda. DeAnne, who had learned about Thomas’s relationship with Mai-Dao, agreed to adopt Linda only if they never spoke of her birth parents again. The novel’s closing lines are, “We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.” Linda finally gets the full story of her life, and the pieces of the puzzle fit together for her at the same time as they fit together for the reader. Linda is able to blend together her Southern Vietnamese and Southern American roots in order to create her own “South,” and become authentically herself.