I read Portia’s Choice; an account of a traumatic experience that adolescent Annie has with Gerry, an adult man. Gerry is Annie’s drama tutor, who preys on Annie’s romantic feelings for him and manipulates her to participate in sexual acts. Annie personally recounts her experience, and tells of the regret her parents feel once they find out about her trauma. In the end, her mother confronts Gerry over the phone and finally ends the year-long trauma that Annie experienced.
I mapped the various characters and whom they spoke with. As Annie notes, her parents feel responsible for not preventing and seeing the signs of this attack. What we see in this map that Annie’s mother is at the heart of all these connections. She arranges Gerry’s tutoring session with Gerry’s mother, speaks with Gerry personally on several occasions, and is the sole parent to deal with the fallout. Perhaps being in this position, Annie’s mother feels she solely failed to see what was going on.
What this map doesn’t reveal is the frequency of the communication between the characters. In Annie’s mother’s defense, Annie hid the relationship from her and pursued it over a pay-phone at school: there was no way for her to know. Further, it’s the secret relationship between Annie and Gerry that is central to this story and the map doesn’t reveal this.
Although, this map does reveal they secretive and unsuspecting way in which Gerry manipulated Annie. Further, it shows the unfortunate nature of this kind of trauma: it may be kept secret, even from those closest to the victim.
Link: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1N2KLzyf0MVaG4ddOZuW5sYoc5fXAf-BSj2AkvBem
Thank you for the brief summary at the beginning of the post, and you also explain each relationship between people who you have connected together. It really helps me to have a better understanding of your google fusion table, and it is a very clear post.:)