Summary

Chapter 5 is titled “Itty-Bitty Fish.” The author attends her first college, Louisiana State University, which is where everyone in her family goes but where she feels very much out of place. The students there, she says, are attractive and popular, but are more interested in partying and indulging themselves. “I feel,” she says, “like an itty-bitty fish swimming in the wrong direction” (49). After the discomfort of her first year, she feels the need to go someplace familiar, so she takes a position as a counselor at the church camp she used to go to as a child, Camp DeSoto. Here, she references how being “Jesus-loving” (50) is something that everyone in her family does and most people in her community do, but then comments that she does not feel the same sort of connection. While at the camp, she struggles to that connection herself...