Bitter in the Mouth is a 2010 novel by Vietnamese-American author Monique Truong. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness narrative structure and follows the character of Linda Hammerick as she comes of age. Linda remembers her childhood in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 1970s and her relationships that follow, through college and beyond. Her present mingles with her past as she learns of her heritage and deals with death, sexual abuse, cancer, adoption, unwanted pregnancies, and family issues. Throughout all of these experiences, Linda lives with a secret extra sense, the ability to taste words, which she later discovers is a form of synesthesia.
Characters
Linda Hammerick
Linda is the main character of the novel. She is a New York lawyer who grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and she has a form of synesthesia that causes her to taste words when she hears them. Part one of the book, “Confession,” focuses heavily on her childhood, with details about her adult life interspersed. Linda tells the story of her best friend Kelly, her next door neighbor Wade, and her rapist, Kelly’s cousin Bobby. She also reflects on her close relationship with her great-uncle, whom she and most other people call Baby Harper, as well as her relationship with her mother DeAnne and her father Thomas. It is made clear that Linda’s childhood was traumatic in several ways. In part two of the book, “Revelation,” we learn more about her long-term relationship with Leo, which is only briefly mentioned in the first half of the novel. She also has to grapple with the death of Baby Harper and the prospect of returning to Boiling Springs.
Linda’s Vietnamese roots are not revealed until the very last scene of “Confession,” when she is graduating from Yale and they call out her birth name: Linh-Dao Nguyen. At this point, several pieces of the puzzle that is Linda’s life fall into place for the reader, and throughout the second half of the novel she directly addresses the problems she faced as a Southerner who looked different than people thought she should.
Kelly Powell
Kelly is Linda's best friend from childhood. They begin exchanging letters when they are children, and they continue to do so even after Linda moves out of Boiling Springs. The two bond quickly because of their mutual obsession with Dolly Parton—which they swear to tell no one about—and the fact that they live on the same street. Linda reveals her synesthesia to Kelly when they are young, which shows how deeply Linda trusts her. Kelly and Linda both experience sexual abuse at the hands of Kelly's male cousin, Bobby. The two also share a childhood crush, a boy named Wade. Linda eventually dates Wade, although she conceals it from Kelly. When Kelly is a teenager, she becomes pregnant and leaves town, only revealing the father of the child—the pair's shared childhood crush, Wade—when Linda returns to Boiling Springs as an adult. Although they had grown apart since Linda moved to New York, they become closer again when she returns to Boiling Springs after the death of Baby Harper.
Baby Harper
Harper is Linda's uncle. She considers him to be her "first love", and he is the member of her family with whom she has the closest relationship. He is a mentor, confidante, and parental figure for Linda. Baby Harper is a photographer and has a collection of photo albums he calls H.E.B.'s, which are filled with photos of everyone but himself. While she is living in New York City, Linda receives photo albums from Baby Harper that contain photos of him dressing up as a woman. Baby Harper was closeted for a long time and would always be the one taking the photos rather than being in them, so this is a very important moment in his character arc. Linda describes that Baby Harper wishes he "would have inhabited a body different from the one that God gave him." In a reflection of his dislike of his body, Baby Harper did not look at himself in the mirror, having only one small mirror in his Greek Revival house. Harper is closeted for most of the novel, but reveals to his family that he is gay when he begins seeing Boiling Springs's funeral director, Cecil. When he and Cecil die suddenly in a plane crash, Linda returns to Boiling Springs and is able to come to terms with his death.
DeAnne Hammerick
DeAnne is Linda's adopted mother. She has trouble accepting Linda as her own child. The two are estranged for most of the novel because Linda believes that Deanne knew of her rape but did nothing about it. By the end of the novel, DeAnne reveals the story of Linda's adoption, and the reasoning for her difficulty accepting Linda becomes more clear.