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LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Sharp Objects, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

A tangled web of deceit lies just beneath the surface in the town of Wind Gap, Missouri, and when Camille Preaker returns to the hometown she fled at first opportunity, she is horrified by how valuable a currency secrecy and deception still is there. As Camille reconnects with old friends, family members, and acquaintances and makes new ones as well, she finds that everyone-including herself-has something to hide. Through Camille's journey to the "underworld" that is her hometown and back, Flynn argues that secrets, lies, and disguises have the power to destabilize and devalue not just interpersonal relationships, but entire communities.

Camille, Adora, and Amma are locked in a three-way game of cat-and-mouse throughout the novel, and the deceptions and false personas they adopt to shield themselves from one another eventually threaten their larger community. As the wealthiest woman in town-and the heiress of the hog farm that sustains its economy-Adora presents a front of confidence, control, and savvy to the world while privately wrestling with the scars of her own childhood abuse at the hands of her mother, Joya: a pathological need for attention and praise, as well as the desire for control over the young female presences in her life. Adora's very name belies her desire to be adored, and yet she never gives any public indication of how desperate she is for attention and affection. When police raid the house at the end of the novel, however, they find her diary, and one of the entries-from the time of Marian's death-reads simply: "Marian is dead. I couldn't stop. I've lost 12 pounds and am skin and bones. Everyone's been incredibly kind. People can be so wonderful." Marian's death is, all at once, a casualty of Adora's masked desire for attention and kindness, a way for Adora to further delude herself into believing she is a beloved member of the community (when really her wealth isolates her from the majority of the town), and a destabilizing force in the social world of Wind Gap. As Adora's friends and fellow townspeople rally around her to comfort her, little do they know that they are fawning over a murderer, and giving an evil woman exactly what she wants.

Amma is perhaps the greatest pretender in the novel. A sexually adventurous, drug-loving child, Amma disguises herself as a "doll" and a simpering good girl while at home in her mother's house-or perhaps it's the other way around. Amma, like her mother, has a seemingly pathological need for attention and adoration. She gets it at home by dressing up in childish, ultra-feminine outfits and subjecting herself to Adora's poisonings, even as she is conscious of what her mother is doing to her-when she submits to Adora, Adora "cares" for her, and thus Amma feels both closer to her mother and in control of the suffering her mother is inflicting upon her. Out on the town, Amma adopts a fearless, persona-decidedly different from the little-girl behavior she affects at home, but grown from the same impulse-to attract attention and devotion from boys and friends through a combination of bullying, peer pressure, substances, sex, and intimidation. It is unclear for much of the novel which Amma is the real Amma-whether it is the defenseless, tantrum prone little girl obsessed with her dollhouse or the party monster she becomes when out with her friends. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that neither persona was the "real" one-Amma is, deep down, a ruthless killer and a pit of need, so detached from the act of causing others pain and suffering that she hardly thinks twice about murdering two of her classmates for getting too close to Adora, who was tutoring them in spelling. Amma's secrets and lies, then, are in many ways the most destabilizing in the entire novel: she tears a community apart, forever changes two families, and, it can be inferred, alters the entire financial and social topography of Wind Gap in allowing her powerful mother to take the fall-at least for a while-for her own crimes.

Camille's greatest deception is not necessarily an outward-facing one. She hides her physical scars from the world, but the person she's attempting to deceive most intentionally is herself. Camille struggles with an addiction to alcohol, which she uses in conjunction with her self-harm routine in order to dull the pain of her unhappy childhood and her sister Marian's death. As the novel progresses, and as Camille spends more time navigating the fraught emotional terrain of her childhood home, it becomes apparent that Camille is actually using her self-destructive behaviors-not to mention the physical distance and façade of detachment she has placed between herself and her family-to hide a dark, awful truth she has been hiding from her years: her mother was responsible for Marian's death. After Camille and Amma spend a night out partying, Adora administers pills and potions of her own making to both girls. When Camille begins vomiting, and sees that Amma is too, she realizes that they are "sick just like Marian," and is ashamed that the "obvious[-ness]" of the truth eluded her, at least consciously, for so long. Camille, in moving to Chicago, drowning herself in alcohol and self-abuse, and distancing herself from her family and hometown, withdrew from the painful truth that was "obvious" and just below the surface, burying it deep down and preventing herself from ever having to confront it. In leaving her hometown, Camille in fact contributed to its destabilization. Camille was the only one "willful" enough to ever resist Adora-she never took Adora's medicines, and her contentious relationship with her mother prevented her from becoming a victim of Adora's Munchausen By Proxy. At the same time, Camille's innate facility with storytelling and her rebellious, perceptive nature could have led to the exposure of the truth about Adora years earlier-and, perhaps, could have spared Amma from her mother's disease and thus the town from Amma's violence.

In Sharp Objects, Flynn paints a portrait of a town profoundly shaken and forever changed by deception. The larger atmosphere in the town-a toxic commitment to keeping away outsiders and preserving the illusion of a kind of Southern gentility and moral purity that never, perhaps, existed in the first place-is further destabilized by the effects of the Preaker/Crellin family's secrets, lies, and games. Flynn uses Wind Gap as a metaphor for a larger social commentary on how secrecy and duplicity can reverberate throughout the world in wild ways.

Secrets, Lies, and Disguises ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Secrets, Lies, and Disguises appears in each chapter of Sharp Objects. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.

Secrets, Lies, and Disguises Quotes in Sharp Objects

Below you will find the important quotes in Sharp Objects related to the theme of Secrets, Lies, and Disguises.

When I was still in grammar school, maybe twelve, I wandered into a neighbor boy's hunting shed, a wood-planked shack where the animals were stripped and split. Ribbons of moist, pink flesh dangled from strings, waiting to be dried for jerky. The dirt floor was rusted with blood. The walls were covered with photographs of naked women. Some of the girls were spreading them selves wide, others were being held down and penetrated. One woman was tied up, her eyes glazed, breasts stretched and veined like grapes, as a man took her from behind. I could smell them all in the thick, gory air.

At home that night, I slipped a finger under my panties and masturbated for the first time, panting and sick.

Explanation and Analysis:

Alan, Adora, and Amma were all gathered in the living room when I returned. The scene was startling, it was so much like the old days with Marian. Amma and my mother sat on the couch, my mother cradling Amma-in a woolen nightgown despite the heat-as she held an ice cube to her lips. My half sister stared up at me with blank contentment, then went back to playing with a glowing mahogany dinner table, exactly like the one in the next room, except that it was about four inches high.

"Nothing to worry about," Alan said, looking up from a newspaper. "Amma's just got the summer chills."

I felt a shot of alarm, then annoyance: I was sinking back into old routines, about to run to the kitchen to heat some tea, just like I always did for Marian when she was sick. I was about to linger near my mother, waiting for her to put an arm around me, too. My mother and Amma said nothing. My mother didn't even look up at me, just nuzzled Amma in closer to her, and cooed into her ear.

[...]

When I was a child, I remember my mother trying to prod me with ointments and oils, homemade remedies and homeopathic nonsense. I sometimes took the foul solutions, more often refused. Then Marian got sick, really sick, and Adora had more important things to do than coaxing me into swallowing wheat-germ extract. Now I had a pang: all those syrups and tablets she proffered, and I rejected. That was the last time I had her full attention as a mother. I suddenly wished I'd been easier.

Related Characters: Camille Preaker (speaker), Alan Crellin (speaker), Adora Crellin, Amma Crellin, Marian Crellin

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words-cook, cupcake, kitty, curls-as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: babydoll. Pulling on a sweater and, in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words? Thousands of hours of therapy have yielded a few ideas from the good doctors. They are often feminine, in a Dick and Jane, pink vs. puppy dog tails sort of way. Or they're flat-out negative. Number of synonyms for anxious carved in my skin: eleven. The one thing I know for sure is that at the time, it was crucial to see these letters on me, and not just see them, but feel them.

As a child, I don't remember ever telling Adora my favorite color, or what I'd like to name my daughter when I grew up. I don't think she ever knew my favorite dish, and I certainly never padded down to her room in the early-morning hours, teary from nightmares. I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me. Oh, yes, and one time she bought me lotion with vitamin E.

For a while I convinced myself that Adora's distance was a defense constructed after Marian. But in truth, I think she's always had more problems with children than she'd ever admit. I think, in fact, she hates them. There's a jealousy, a resentfulness that I can feel even now, in my memory. At one point, she probably liked the idea of a daughter. When she was a girl, I bet she daydreamed of being a mother, of coddling, of licking her child like a milk-swelled cat. She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them.

Related Characters: Camille Preaker (speaker), Adora Crellin, Marian Crellin

I have one memory that catches in me like a nasty clump of blood. Marian was dead about two years, and my mother had a cluster of friends come over for afternoon drinks. One of them brought a baby. For hours, the child was cooed over, smothered with red-lipstick kisses, tidied up with tissues, then lipstick smacked again. I was supposed to be reading in my room, but I sat at the top of the stairs watching.

My mother finally was handed the baby, and she cuddled it ferociously. Oh, how wonderful it is to hold a baby again! Adora jiggled it on her knee, walked it around the rooms, whispered to it, and I looked down from above like a spiteful little god, the back of my hand placed against my face, imagining how it felt to be cheek to cheek with my mother.

When the ladies went into the kitchen to help tidy up the dishes, something changed. I remember my mother, alone in the living room, staring at the child almost lasciviously. She pressed her lips hard against the baby's apple slice of a cheek. Then she opened her mouth just slightly, took a tiny bit of flesh between her teeth, and gave it a little bite.

The baby wailed. The blotch faded as Adora snuggled the child, and told the other women it was just being fussy. I ran to Marian's room and got under the covers.

Related Characters: Camille Preaker (speaker), Adora Crellin, Marian Crellin

Most sows are repeatedly inseminated, brood after brood, till their bodies give way and they go to slaughter. But while they're still useful, they're made to nurse-strapped to their sides in a farrowing crate, legs apart, nipples exposed. Pigs are extremely smart, sociable creatures, and this forced assembly-line intimacy makes the nursing sows want to die. Which, as soon as they dry up, they do.

Even the idea of this practice I find repulsive. But the sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. Like watching a rape and saying nothing. I saw Amma at the far end of the barn, standing at the edge of one metal farrowing crate. A few men were pulling one pack of squealing piglets out of the stall, throwing another pack in. I moved to the far side of the barn so I could stand behind Amma without her seeing me. The pig lay nearly comatose on its side, its belly exposed between metal bars, red, bloody nipples pointing out like fingers. [...]

The piglets in the stall were swarming over the sow like ants on a glob of jelly. The nipples were fought over, bouncing in and out of mouths, jiggling tautly like rubber. The sow's eyes rolled up into her head. Amina sat down cross-legged and gazed, fascinated. After five minutes she was in the same position, now smiling and squirming. I had to leave. I walked, first slowly, then broke into a scramble to my car. Door shut, radio blasting, warm bourbon stinging my throat, I drove away from the stink and sound. And that child.

Related Characters: Camille Preaker (speaker), Amma Crellin

"How do you lash out?" We were near my mother's house now, and my high was in full bloom. My hair swished on my shoulders like warm water and I swayed side to side to no particular music. A snail shell lay on the edge of the sidewalk and my eyes looped into its curlicue.

"You know. You know how sometimes you need to hurt."She said it as if she were selling a new hair product.

"There are better ways to deal with boredom and claustrophobia than to hurt," I said. "You're a smart girl, you know that." I realized her fingers were inside the cuffs of my shirt, touching the ridges of my scars. I didn't stop her."Do you cut, Amma?"

"I hurt," she squealed, and twirled out onto the street, spinning flamboyantly, her head back, her arms outstretched like a swan. "I love it!" she screamed. The echo ran down the street, where my mother's house stood watch on the corner.

"I was friends with them for a while," she said finally, talking into her chest. "We had fun, running around in the woods. We were wild. We'd hurt things together. We killed a cat once. But then she"-as always Adora's name went unsaid-"got all interested in them. I could never have anything to myself. They weren't my secrets anymore. They were always coming by the house. They started asking me questions about being sick. They were going to ruin everything. She didn't even realize it." Amma rubbed her shorn hair harshly. "And why did Ann have to bite . . . her? I couldn't stop thinking about it. Why Ann could bite her, and I couldn't."

She refused to say more, answered only in sighs and coughs. As for the teeth, she took the teeth only because she needed them. The dollhouse had to be perfect, just like everything else Amma loved.

I think there is more. Ann and Natalie died because Adora paid attention to them. Amma could only view it as a raw deal. Amma, who had allowed my mother to sicken her for so long.

Sometimes when you let people do things to you, you 're really doing it to them. Amma controlled Adora by letting Adora sicken her. In return, she demanded uncontested love and loyalty. No other little girls allowed. For the same reasons she murdered Lily Burke. Because, Amma suspected, I liked her better.

You can come up with four thousand other guesses, of course, about why Amma did it. In the end, the fact remains: Amma enjoyed hurting. I like violence, she'd shrieked at me. I blame my mother. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

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