We Deserve Monuments

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapter 6-Interlude 5

Chapters 12-16

Chapters 17-21

Chapter 22-Interlude 11

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Avery’s Lip Piercing

Content Warning: This section of the guide references racism, colorism, anti-gay bias, anti-fat bias, emotional abuse, and terminal illness.

Avery’s lip piercing means different things to her in different contexts. When she moves to Bardell, she considers it a clear signal of her LGBTQ+ identity—something that inspires mixed feelings in those she meets. She feels proud of her identity and wishes to show it, rendering the symbol of the lip ring as a form of perpetual coming out so that she does not feel her identity is in question. At the same time, however, she worries that she will face discrimination in Bardell more than she did in DC—an idea that the text complicates.

Though Avery does face some overt anti-gay bias (from her classmate, Tim, who mockingly asks if she’s a lesbian, and later from Carole, who accuses her of “corrupting” Simone), she realizes that she has also tacitly faced this bias in DC. There, her friends Hikari and Kelsi disapproved of her lip ring, calling it “trashy.” This, Avery gradually embraces, is one of the ways in which her DC friends stifled her identity, prescribing certain “correct” ways of being and performing a pansexual identity that contains elements of anti-Black racism, albeit ones that are less overt than what she faces in Bardell.

The piercing also symbolizes the shifting relationship between Avery and Letty. When she first sees it, Letty criticizes the piercing, commenting that it makes Avery look like a fish caught on a hook. While the resulting nickname “Fish” starts out as a way for prickly Letty to keep Avery at arm’s length, it becomes a fond inside joke between the two, illustrating their increased intimacy.

Shared Meals

The novel frames shared meals as moments of connection between its characters. Sometimes these connections are planned, such as when Zora takes Avery to the Renaissance to answer her questions about Zora, Carole, and Letty’s history and animosity. In other cases, the connection between eating and communication is less intentional, such as when Simone confesses her sexuality to Avery while the two get pizza. These scenes suggest that food is not just something that the characters need to survive, but rather that the act of eating together constitutes its own form of connection from which further emotional intimacies can arise. The corollary to this is when Avery finds herself eating lunch alone after the argument with Simone and Jade. The novel connects eating with togetherness, which makes her time eating alone a particularly painful reminder of the conflict with her friends.

Letters

The novel presents letters both as ways to connect with a lost family history and as lost opportunities that, when wasted, prevent family members from connecting in the present. Hammonds uses letters in this first capacity through Ray’s love letters to Letty from their courtship. As Letty ails, Avery reads Ray’s letters to her grandmother, an act that lets both generations of women feel closer to Ray. For Letty, this is a return, albeit an incomplete one, to the love she has lost. For Avery, this is a chance to get to know her grandfather, who died long before her birth.

The letters that Zora wrote to Letty during college, however, constitute a lost opportunity for connection. Letty’s failure to respond to these letters still pains Zora many years later, and the realization, shortly before Letty’s death, that Letty at least read those letters provides consolation too late for the women to discuss it. Letty dies within hours of the discovery. She does, however, leave behind her journals, in which she wrote but never sent responses. This renders those journals as a form of letter themselves, in which Letty can talk to her daughter and granddaughter even past her death. This is a bittersweet recognition, however, as it illustrates the ways that the women were unable to communicate with one another while Letty was alive.