Laurie Halse Anderson tends to use teenagers as a voice for girls who are dealing with deeply traumatic issues. For example, in Speak, Melinda was raped at the beginning of the book and throughout the novel, she incorporates Melinda’s trauma into how Melinda goes through her day-to-day life. She slowly learns how to cope with her emotions. She is also very blunt and sarcastic, which reflects her depression and isolation from everyone else. 

"It’s easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say." — Speak

This author has a way of writing very short statements, this kind of writing for Anderson increases with the intensity of emotions. She also has a tendency of throwing random short statements in the story that intensifies the reader’s emotions towards the actions taking place. This can be seen in The Impossible Knife of Memory when Hayley shows how she wants to relate with the outside world and this quote shows her desperation in a short sentence that says all that it needs to.

"I needed to hear the world but didn’t want the world to know I was listening." — The Impossible Knife of Memory

Laurie Halse Anderson utilizes her novels to make awareness on really traumatic events, such as rape, PTSD, self-harm, annorexia, and more. The topic of rape and making awareness is exemplified in both her fiction novel “Speak” and her nonfiction novel “Shout”, which is about Anderson’s experience with rape. Anderson’s main character in Speak also shows how Melinda deals with her pain. She doesn’t sugarcoat the pain, but rather gives herself space for healing. But, Melinda’s PTSD from the rape is shown through the actions that she takes throughout the novel. Anderson writes with raw honesty and does not play by the rules when it comes to raising awareness about traumatic topics.

“It happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding.” — Speak

I used a teenage girl in this emulation to show Anderson’s use of girls who are dealing with deeply traumatic issues. Like the main character in “Speak”, this teenage girl is suffering from being sexually assaulted and is attempting to navigate her situation. When the teenage girl sees the necklace, this sight immediately triggers her into thinking about the night that she was sexually assaulted. This is also shown in “Speak” when Melinda is dissecting a frog with her lab partner. She gets a flashback of being helpless like the frog is and gets extremely triggered by the situation. 

By utilizing short statements when the main character would have a triggering thought, these statements show the growing intensity in the emotions the character was facing as she walked through the woods. For example, when she thought about how she was sexually assaulted, she was saying that she needs help and she wishes someone would listen to her and her experience. The short statements highlight the character’s growing desperation for someone to understand what she was going through. She shows some of the same characteristics as Hayley from “The Impossible Knife of Memory”. Both of these characters just want to be understood and have someone understand why they are acting the way they are. For the character in the emulation, she wants someone to understand that she was raped. For Hayley, she wants someone to understand the pressure she is being put under from taking care of her dad who suffers with PTSD from the war. 

With the character self reflecting and telling herself that she needs to talk to someone, this shows how there is still awareness spread that it is okay to talk to someone and get help. Throughout multiple of Laurie Halse Anderson’s novels, she uses girls fighting for healing after traumatic experiences to give a place for an outlet of growth in her writing. In Anderson’s nonfiction novel “Shout”, she talks about her own experience with rape and she reflects these emotions in the novels that she writes. Anderson does a good job talking about difficult topics in a way that empowers both the reader and the main character to speak out and talk about their experiences. In the emulation, the narrator takes the first step in the healing process by realizing that she needed help and started talking about going to therapy.