Bastard Out of Carolina Themes

Sometimes it feels like Bastard Out of Carolina could be made into a sitcom called Meet the Boatwrights—though it would probably have to be aired late at night. Bone has a very close relationship...

The Boatwright men and the Boatwright women lead very different lives in Bastard Out of Carolina. Again and again, Bone tells us that the men are like overgrown children who get taken care of by th...

Wondering why people in Bastard Out of Carolina keep talking about Bone's black hair? Or why Bone is obsessed with how old her mother and aunts look? Well, appearances tell us a lot about a charac...

As our favorite anti-capitalization poet e. e. cummings says, "It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are." That couldn't be truer for Bone in Bastard Out of Carolina, who has a who...

If there is one thing that Bastard Out of Carolina shows, it's that love is a complicated, complicated thing. In fact, it seems that the older you get, the more complicated love gets. Let's start b...

Drinking and fighting, getting thrown in jail, getting the furniture repossessed… the Boatwrights certainly seem like they're trying to live up to the trash stereotype. At the same time, it looks...

Bastard Out of Carolina has got its share of guilt and blame, and Bone herself is a swirling vortex of both. As readers on the outside, we know that a lot of Bone's feelings of guilt are misplaced:...

Bastard Out of Carolina is not a book about puppies and rainbows, that's for sure. You might want to keep the Kleenex handy. While pointing to every instance of suffering in the book would take too...

Sex is definitely the elephant-in-the-room topic for Bastard Out of Carolina. Normally this would be everyone's favorite theme, but of course sex in this novel—by which we mean quite a few kinds...