Laurie Halse Anderson’s realistic fiction book Speak depicts the life of Melinda Sordino, a 9th grader who called the police at a party after being raped and is now a social outcast. The pain from the memories of being raped keep her silent as she struggles through a powerful depression and the problems that go with being in high school. Anderson uses mirrors as a motif throughout the story to portray the stages of depression Melinda goes through. At the start of the story Melinda leads a very depressed hidden life; Anderson uses the mirror to represent this. After Melinda gets home from an exhausting day at school and realizes how bad her scabs are she tells us, “I get out of bed and take down the mirror. I put it in the back of my closet, facing the wall” (Anderson 17). Melinda often hides from her problems. The hiding of the mirror signifies how she is not strong enough to confront her problems and instead chooses to hide from them. Mirrors also depict her mental state when she starts to redecorate her closet for the first time, she says “The first thing to change is the mirror. It is screwed to the wall so I cover it with a …show more content…
When Melinda goes shopping for new clothes and looks in the mirror at Efferts, “Am I in there somewhere. A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in close, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store” (Anderson 124). The first step to solving a problem is to realize it is there. Melinda does exactly this when she looks into the mirror and sees herself with dark circles underneath her eyes. Shortly after this she resolves to become normal again saying “I have to stay away from the closet, go to all my classes. I will make myself normal again” (Anderson 125). Melinda begins to recall what she was in the past and feels she needs to do something to turn her life