Speak Book Report

You Cannot Choose Your Family

Have you ever thought about your mental, social health and your mental growth? In the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, it is brought up that the people who are around the main character, Melinda, affect her mental, social health, and her mental growth. How family and friends or even the people we hardly know can make an impact on our lives in both negative and positive ways. Melinda demonstrates this throughout the entire book. “I bet they’d be divorced by now if I hadn’t been born. I’m sure I was a huge disappointment. I’m not pretty or smart or athletic. I’m just like them— an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies. I can’t believe we have to keep playacting until I graduate. It’s a shame we can’t just

So, because she does not feel she can have someone who will understand her and not punish her for what happened, she does not speak. Her parent’s behavior toward her and each other make herself feel like she is a disappointment. Her mental state of mind is unstable and is struggling to process what happened to her. When her family and the people around her start pulling her down, she does not feel as strong and confident to stand up for herself and to face her so to speak demons. A perfect example of this is “I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush. Mom sees the wrist at breakfast. Mom: “I don’t have time for this, Melinda.”(Anderson 88). Her parent hardly pay attention to her so she tries to deal with the constant memory of the incident on her own. Her friends from previous years all ignored her for what had transpired at the party. She felt no one cared so her depression became more serious. All that they did hurt her and socially scarred

Before, she was innocent, confident and happy her state of mind was good and she had good grades. At the beginning of the novel she was depressed and super unhappy with her life, herself and her grades were bad. That kind of shows in this statement “I used to be like Heather. Have I changed that much in two months? She is happy, driven, aerobically fit. She has a nice mom and an awesome television. But she’s like a dog that keeps jumping into your lap. She always walks with me down the halls chattering a million miles a minute. My goal is to go home and take a nap.”(Anderson 24). It also shows that she knows that she has mentally change greatly in just two months. As Melinda goes through the school year, she starts to realize that she was raped and that she needed to tell someone. The first person she tells Rachel, she tells because at the time Rachel was dating Andy and Melinda did not want her to be hurt by Andy. That right there shows that she had grown a lot since it had happen she had put someone else before her own comfort to protect them. She had finally spoken and that was the beginning of her healing process, she’s becoming healed and will be able to actually focus on her grades and things that make her