Prologue

The novel begins with a brief introduction of Charity's life. For several years, she has been cruising through life on autopilot numb from any emotions. Although she goes to college, she has little enthusiasm for it and coasts through her classes with minimal effort. We learn on this particular day that her school-appointed therapist, Hunter, has given her a red journal so she can write down the thoughts she has trouble vocalizing throughout her sessions and day-to-day life. Used to feeling invisible her entire life, Charity is touched by Hunter's gesture and she experiences an onset of overwhelming emotions which frighten her. The scared teenager flees to a restroom, locks herself in a stall and cuts herself with a razor to numb the feelings that confuse her.

Main story

Encouraged by feeling genuine emotions for the first time in years, Charity vows to stop cutting and strive for a normal life. She uses the journal to reach out to her father, the man who left her when she was a baby. Although Charity doesn't know her father's whereabouts, she begins writing lengthy entries to him explaining what has happened to her in the years since he left.

Charity writes to her father that she knows very little about him. She knows he's from Henderson, Nevada and on the evening of his high school graduation, he drove to Long Beach, California to visit a friend. When he arrived his friend was out of town, but his female roommate (Charity's eventual mom) was home. The two embarked on a whirlwind romance and nine months later, their daughter, Charity, was born.

Plagued by depressive episodes, Charity's father is unable to keep a job so he becomes his child's primary caretaker. Charity's mom, however, is furious when he repeatedly disappears with their daughter for hours at a time. After a big blowup, Charity's dad storms out of their apartment and never returns.

Charity's journal descriptions reveal her strained, unfulfilled relationship with her mother. Like her child, Charity's mom has difficulty expressing her emotions and often shuns her daughter's attempts to discuss anything "messy." While Charity secretly yearns to talk about all emotions: the good, the bad, and ugly, her mother has little interest in sharing her intimate thoughts with anyone and is only a superficial presence in her child's life.

Feeling more lonely each day, Charity slips into an even deeper depression, stops seeing her therapist and returns to her familiar, comforting routine of cutting herself to distract herself from the emotional anguish she feels. She even steals her mother's prescription pain medication in a desperate attempt to self-medicate. Finally, she drops out of school but keeps it a secret from her mother.

In a later chapter Charity admits to her father that she discovered cutting six years earlier when she began struggling academically and socially at her middle school and "invented" a way to distract herself from the emotion pain she felt . Despite the high frequency of her cutting, she always managed to keep it a secret from her everyone, including her mother.

It's not until college when Charity's secret is finally discovered, One of her teachers notices the scars on Charity's arms and sends her to the school therapist, Hunter. Feeling angry that she was coerced into therapy, a defiant Charity refuses to cooperate during therapy sessions.

As Charity's depression continues to worsen, her cutting increases to the point that she worries about her physical well-being. Finally. one day, the broken down cutter allows her mother to see her scars and the two seek professional help for her self-harming ways. The book ends with Charity writing a farewell entry to her father as she inches toward recovery. Although she still occasionally slips back into her cutting habit, the hopeful teenager now has her supportive mother by her side.