The Swan In The Orange Skirt

This is a memoir written in third-person limited narration. The form of narration allows for safe distance; a divide between myself and the protagonist, and a separation between the text and my experiences. The story is entirely personal, underlining and addressing OCD, anxiety, sexual assault, childhood trauma, and body dysmorphia (trigger warning). She shares her life and thought processes (her common threads and train of thought) through the story of a woman riding on a subway. The woman encounters several individuals and is faced with many triggering circumstances. The people and actions she comes across on the train trigger and provoke explanations of short-story plots of her past. The smaller plot lines are stories explaining her experiences and various aspects of her personality or character. Throughout the book, bird metaphors, the contrast between constraint and restraint, reality versus unreality, rationality versus irrationality, and several other hidden symbols are woven into the text. By elegantly allowing the reader to understand her, her vulnerability is morphing her from a reserved, quiet individual into a strong woman with a voice.