Darling Girls

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of childhood abuse, including violence toward infants and young children, sexual exploitation and extortion, domestic violence, and drug addiction. Suicide is also briefly mentioned.

An unnamed first-person narrator enters the office of a psychiatrist named Dr. Warren. Dr. Warren does not speak for a few minutes, which makes the narrator uncomfortable. When the patient asks how to start, Dr. Warren recommends that the person “might want to talk about what happened at Wild Meadows” (2). The narrator is taken aback by this request. Spotting a newspaper in Dr. Warren’s file, the narrator realizes that the psychiatrist, just like everyone else, does not actually care about the suffering that the narrator endured at the hands of an unnamed woman. The narrator tells Dr. Warren that they cannot speak about Wild Meadows, at least not yet.

The narrative shifts to six months earlier. The story is now told from a third-person perspective that follows a woman named Jessica. She works as “Australia’s leading expert on home organization” (5), frequently appearing on talk shows to deliver handy organizational tips. Today, Jessica is annoyed when she is delayed by a home organization client named Debbie, who invited all of her friends over to watch as Jessica reorganized the woman’s bathroom cabinets.