Day 11

This chapter always makes me almost forget this isn't fiction because the choice of this role swap meeting is too good, too terrible. There's so much swapping: the externs traded out; the inmates pick one another's names out of a hat to show each other what they think the other is.

The withholding of information here is fascinating: she does not tell us who everyone hopes to draw at first, never tells us who she picks; instead there's space for us to do a little role-playing: we watch, a little jarred, as Davy Jones rejects performing Bette.

Thread through all of this is what feels like escalation as Trudy's being put on lithium: "They're going to try to help me," she says. But what have we learned about what "help" means here:

And lithium was like the sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet: the final out, the ultimate disclaimer. It couldn't bring you back; it was only for the damned.