Short

“One thing I’ve decided is that life is just one big, long struggle to find applause. Even when people die, they are hoping someone writes a list of accomplishments about them.”

As part of Processing Grief, Julia often thinks about legacy and what is remembered after a person dies or an experience ends. At the start of the novel, she’s preoccupied with accomplishments as a measure of worth, so she often thinks about how she measures up in relation to others. This is a belief that the events of the novel will challenge.

“My goals for this summer, if I had goals, would be to not worry about my height and also to find new ways to be happy now that Ramon is gone.”

This line shows how Julia perceives herself to be unmotivated and listless, characteristics that her participation in the play will directly challenge. This line also presents Julia’s two internal conflicts—her height and her grief over Ramon—which will be central to the novel.

“Luckily, Shawn stops talking about firing us for not having ‘the ability to do the job.’ And that’s when I realize some part of me—a big part on the inside—must want to be here, because right now not being in the show feels like it would be terrible.”

Julia demonstrates her growing self-awareness, recognizing her own feelings and interpreting what they might mean. This also marks her turn from reluctance about being in the cast to embracing her role in the play.

“That’s when I decide that this is going to be the summer when the little people call the shots.”

Where Julia has up until this point been embarrassed or concerned about her height, here she embraces her height as something positive that gives her power. In her family, Julia is an outlier—shorter than even her young brother—but she shares that characteristic with two members of her new theater family, and specifically with two of her mentor figures: Shawn Barr and Olive.

“I decide I need to take care of the history of this summer myself.”

Julia recognizes that her father gets to decide which parts of their family history are memorialized because he creates their family scrapbooks. Julia also acknowledges that her perspective is important and different from her father’s and that she’ll want to remember this summer on her own terms. This shows her character development and her coming into her own voice.

“I just can’t think about dying without feeling sick to my stomach. I know it’s the circle of life, but it’s also a terrible weight to carry around, especially for a young person.”

The metaphor of “a terrible weight” shows how all-encompassing and difficult Julia’s grief has been up until this point. Because of the novel’s first-person point of view, the reader has witnessed how Julia carries the memory of Ramon around with her and how often she looks for him or is reminded of him.

“I’ve decided to really pay attention to how people are moving now that Shawn Barr has taught us that it’s important. I will be watching what’s called body language in everyone around me, especially my mom and dad.”

As one of Julia’s mentors, Shawn Barr has taught her a new skill for interpreting the world: body language. In teaching Julia that a person’s physicality can be a form of communication, Shawn Barr also shows Julia how to value the physical self rather than pass judgment on it, building on the novel’s theme of Body Positivity, Discrimination, and Intersectionality.

“It’s like cooking fondue: A lot of work for what you get in the end.”

This simile represents the difference between the stage manager Charisse’s directing style and Shawn Barr’s. Where Shawn Barr embraces play and joy, Charisse focuses entirely on mechanics and drilling, treating theater rehearsal as a task more like school. Ultimately, Charisse’s approach isn’t effective and in fact causes the cast to regress; as the novel depicts it, The Power and Purpose of Theater involves its ability to foreground multiple voices rather than merely the director’s.

“If someone is looking at this record many years in the future (let’s say if I’m famous or if there is a volcano eruption and our town is buried under twenty feet of molten lava and then discovered 1,500 years later with everything in good shape), I wouldn’t want people to think I was more interested in the bad than the good things.”

Julia’s hypothetical scenario demonstrates her continued reflection on legacy and death; she contextualizes her decision to keep the scrapbook record in terms of her own eventual death. The scrapbook also gives her the chance to reflect on her summer thus far and change her attitudes or decisions correspondingly, making it a symbol of her growth. In this case, her reflection leads to her decision to make a happy memory, which ultimately puts her in Mrs. Chang’s path.

“I’m not in charge of the play, and as far as I can tell, I have the worst voice of all the singers. I’m not any kind of dancer, and I’m pretty sure I only got the part because I’m not tall but I can be like a terrier.”

Julia’s internal monologue reveals that though she’s embraced being a member of the cast, she still doesn’t see the value she brings to the show or to the people around her. Julia’s self-esteem increases as she participates more in the cast, showing how art helps her discover and embrace her skills.

“He wore a cape every day until he was five years old and the kindergarten teacher made him take it off. He bought a top hat at a garage sale three months ago, and he puts that on to practice magic tricks. So far, he hasn’t mastered even one in any kind of believable way. But he’s a better Munchkin than me on all levels.”

Julia characterizes Randy as a person who doesn’t mind being noticed, does what he wants without shame, and enjoys doing activities even if he isn’t very good at them. Randy is a foil for Julia, who is embarrassed by Mrs. Chang, worries about standing out, and is concerned about her accomplishments, success, and talent (or lack thereof).

“I’m showing my teeth and I’m not blinking.

Ramon always looked like this when he heard the words ‘Give the dog a bath.’”

Julia doesn’t want to be the lead Munchkin dancer, but she feels immediately trapped in the role. Julia uses the description of Ramon avoiding a bath to show her panic and her sense that she can’t escape. The reference to Ramon also shows how Julia continues to see the world around her in relation to her grief. In referencing a bath specifically, the author also suggests that this new role will be good for Julia—a fresh start—in the same way that a bath is good for a pet.

“Olive and I return outside, but instead of going back to the table by the door, I head over to a bench that’s under the shade of a tree near the side of the building. I’m not hiding us, but I don’t like people to stare at Olive. When we take our seats she says, ‘I don’t care if people look at me.’”

When Olive and Julia first arrive at Dell Hoff’s, Julia notices people openly staring at Olive, which is why Julia steers them toward a seat further away from the door. Olive’s response shows Julia that she doesn’t need to hide her differences: She can embrace them as part of her identity.

“Olive isn’t tall but she’s large in my life.”

Julia establishes Olive as her mentor and uses a play on words to highlight how Olive’s size doesn’t prevent her from having a big influence in Julia’s life. This ties directly to Julia’s internal conflict surrounding her height; Olive is an example of how physical difference can be positive rather than seen as some kind of deficit.

“I feel like my insides are exploding, because my stomach is going flippity-flop.”

Julia uses a simile (“like […] exploding”) and an onomatopoeia (“flippity-flop”) to describe her excitement and nervousness about earning her second role in the show: a flying monkey. By describing Julia’s physical reaction, the author brings the reader deeper into the first-person perspective.

“I’m learning a big lesson right now, which is that the same thing can be rotten one day and then amazing the next.”

Julia describes how one day she wanted to quit because of her role as lead Munchkin dancer, but the next day she enjoyed the responsibility and even earned a new role. This lesson also applies to Julia’s journey through processing grief, where memories of Ramon can be difficult one day but easier the next.

“I look over at my mom and I try to sound as determined as I can manage. ‘I feel that being part of this show, especially playing two different roles and learning how to do wire work and fly, is helping me reach my true potential.’”

At the start of the novel, Julia’s parents are concerned about her height, her apathy, and her development. Julia references her potential here as a rhetorical tactic to get her mother to allow Julia to participate in the wire work, but also as a genuine reflection of Julia’s own growth over the summer. Julia has a lively inner monologue but does not often communicate what she’s thinking aloud, but here she is able to communicate a deep truth about herself to her mother.

“I’ve learned it’s much better to have a role model who is alive and who you know, because you can pick up so many more tips. I still like Eleanor Roosevelt, but she can’t compete with Olive.”

Julia is explicitly observing and copying Olive to learn from her. This also marks her shift from accepting adult instruction at face value (choosing Eleanor Roosevelt as a mentor because her teacher told her to) to coming to her own conclusions and decisions based on her own values.

“Olive’s voice is filled with emotion as she says, ‘People look at me and they see someone who is short—before they see a woman, or before they see a person of color.’ I have to admit that this happened to me when I first laid eyes on her. I saw a short person and I thought she was a kid. I really didn’t think at all about her being a person of color.”

As the novel is told in first person, Julia’s recognition that Olive is a person of color is also the reader’s. That Julia recognizes her own self-centeredness and potential bias and chooses to pay closer attention to others before making judgments nudges the reader to do the same. Olive represents the concept of intersectionality: Her physical difference, her gender, and her race all interact with one another and create specific social barriers.

“I decide that art might have two parts: Making things up and feeling things.”

One effect of Shawn Barr’s speech about art in the previous scene is that Julia begins thinking about theater as an art form; here, for instance, she teases out how the role of art differs for the artist and the audience. As part of her coming-of-age, Julia is forming her own worldview and set of values.

“We are soaring, moving with no effort on invisible wings. This is what loving someone or something feels like.”

Julia is dreaming about Ramon and wire work, so in a sense she is literally soaring. However, she is also using soaring as a simile to describe the feeling of loving someone or something. By saying “something” here, Julia is also opening her simile to apply to more than just Ramon, a sign of her further processing her grief.

“I’m not even looking for Ramon so much, which feels wrong. But I just don’t see him in all of his old places like I used to. Maybe I’m getting comfortable with the empty space. Or maybe having so many new things in my life is filling it up.”

This line shows Julia’s growth in regard to her grief over Ramon. Whereas at the start of the novel, Julia was seeing Ramon everywhere, as opening night approaches, she’s not as overcome with thoughts of Ramon. Through Julia’s own thoughts, the author suggests that one way to cope with grief is to find new things to love.

“The old us is a new us every day, and we have to accept that we will have a beginning and a middle and an end.”

When Julia learns that Mrs. Chang’s daughter is dead, they share a moment of catharsis and cry with one another over their grief. Julia comes to understand that goodbyes, endings, and deaths are inescapable and necessary and that there are small, daily griefs as well as large ones.