Content Warning: This section discusses colorism, forced transition and gender dysphoria, discrimination and violence toward transgender people, domestic violence, and sexual violence.

“Someone who wanted her and thought she was the greatest mother in the world. Someone who needed her […] Yes, she needed a girl. She had to have one. And if God thought He was going to deny her, Emma Jean resolved, He had another thing coming.”

Emma Jean decides that she will raise her baby as a girl to shower love upon a daughter and make up for her mother’s cruel treatment of her when she was a child. In this decision, Emma Jean is believed to defy God, a point that is repeatedly discussed after the truth about Perfect is publicly revealed. This moment becomes ironic toward the end of the novel when Emma Jean realizes that she has been a bad mother to Paul and has caused him immense suffering.

“The high-pitched ringing in her ears reminded her of the incessant chirping outside her screenless window every night, or maybe it resembled the chiming of the church bell on Sunday morning. That, and the fact that everything she reached for seemed to back away from her, made Emma Jean wonder why God didn’t just take her away.”

After being harmed by her mother, the young Emma Jean contemplates why God allows her to suffer. The adult Emma Jean repeats this idea throughout the novel, always wondering why God has never been kind to her, and this morose attitude drives many of her most self-destructive actions.

“Lies never work out the way you think they will.”

After Henrietta lies to Gus and the boys at Emma Jean’s insistence, she is distraught and enraged by Emma Jean’s decision to raise Perfect as a girl. She remembers the words of her mother and believes that the lie she told that let her raise her sister’s daughter as her own is the reason that she is currently suffering. However, this quote also functions as a piece of