What are the main themes of the novel?
A. It’s about the struggle to find an identity when all of life’s obstacles are thrown in your way. It’s about the resilience of the human spirit. It’s about the possibility of human connection and how healing that can be. It’s about children having personalities that can’t be stamped out of them by others. Q. Why write the story from a child’s point of view? A. I’d been writing a number of stories from children’s perspectives, which I loved because everything children come across is new. It leaves so much room for both tragedy and comedy as their innocence clashes with reality. So I started at the beginning of a girl’s life, knowing it was about the struggle to articulate something and, like a child’s life, I just let it unfold. Q. What is the significance of title? A. A child like Thelma doesn’t have the words to describe their experience. Without words, she draws on the incredible resources of her vivid imagination and a wacky sense of humour to make sense of things, to make things
