You’re an American girl

“You’re an American girl” is a recurring expression through which Kelly Kelleher is urged to claim her wishes and, later, sustains her own will to live. It links an ideal of American self-determination to her changing bodily circumstances, but the novel makes that ideal uneasy: advice to assert herself exists alongside situations in which male desire, danger, and limited freedom shape what she can do.

A Promise of Self-Determination

The expression first appears as direct encouragement: Kelly is told that, as an American girl, she deserves to make her wishes known and have her own way once in a while. Its emphasis on “YOUR” turns an expansive national identity into a personal claim. The sentence imagines independence not as an abstraction but as permission for Kelly to speak and choose for herself.

The phrase returns after Kelly has been trying to restore her health and sense of normality. She has regained some of the weight she lost through self-starvation and is determined to eat regularly; in this context, being an American girl is associated with looking her best and giving her all. The language makes recovery sound like an act of self-possession, while also revealing how readily that ideal can be tied to appearance and disciplined bodily presentation.

Desire and Unequal Agency

The expression’s promise of choice is tested in Kelly’s relationships and encounters. During a dune walk with The Senator, his hands grip her bare shoulders as wind and surf surround them. She feels shy and eager, yet thinks both that the moment cannot be happening and that something is about to happen which cannot be stopped. The scene gives her response two simultaneous registers: attraction and apprehension.

Kelly’s reflections on kissing sharpen this conflict. She recognizes the jolt of desire, but experiences it as the man’s rather than her own; after kissing The Senator, anxiety and guilt follow, as though having made him want her has made refusal impossible. This pattern complicates the expression’s call to assert her wishes. The ideal of the autonomous American girl is voiced against a bodily experience in which male desire can feel more immediate and commanding than her own choice.

The Phrase in the Car

On the night of the accident, the expression accompanies Kelly and The Senator’s drive from Buffy St. John’s party toward Brockden's Landing. The Senator teases her about the Beatles, then abruptly turns onto Old Ferry Road, a badly rutted route that had not been maintained and should have been closed. He is heading toward the ferry, but has taken an obsolete road; the expression’s confidence in choice thus sits beside a journey shaped by a mistaken turn and a deteriorating road.

When the Toyota skids and plunges into Indian Creek, the phrase changes force. The Senator escapes in blind panic, kicking Kelly as he tries to get free, while she remains trapped in the sinking car. Kelly understands that he acted in terror, but that understanding does not free her. In the rising black water, survival is no longer a question of being granted one’s way: it becomes a physical struggle for breath and movement.

Survival and the Expression’s Reversal

As the car sinks, the language of American identity returns as an insistence that Kelly loves her life and believes she has chosen it. She imagines herself strong enough to fight, and bargains with an imagined rescue team, offering her right leg or both legs if amputation is necessary. Her willingness to sacrifice them makes the stakes concrete: the demand is not for an intact or idealized life, but for the chance to continue living.

The expression therefore carries both an inherited promise and a hard-won urgency. Earlier, it presents self-assertion as a freedom Kelly deserves; in the car, that freedom has been reduced to her effort to keep herself alive under conditions she did not choose. Its recurrence does not erase the gap between the ideal of personal agency and the constraints of gendered desire, a dangerous road, and entrapment. Instead, the phrase measures that gap—and gives voice to Kelly’s resistance within it.