The Secret Life of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

It is hard for human being to come to come to terms with drastic mistakes that they made in their past; nothing is different for Lily Owens from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.

            At the age of three Lily shot her mother. It wasn’t purposeful; she found a gun lying on the floor of her parents’ South Carolina home, and not knowing what she was doing, pulled the trigger. Lily’s mistake haunts her continuously with pain, self-pity and regret, and denial that it really was her.

            Many times in the book she remembers that life changing day, and is not sure what to make of it in her mind. Sometimes Lily will make herself believe a scenario where it was really her father who fired the gun. She still always knew somewhere deep-down-inside that it was her, and no one else. In the book she states, “I knew that the explosion I’d heard that day had killed her. The sound still sneaked into my head once in a while and surprised me” (17). This quote shows a sense of not being at terms with what had happened. When she says that the sound surprised her, a reader can interpret that she tried to forget about killing her mother, instead of accepting what happened. This causes her to blame others, the others being her father T. Ray. When she is in denial, all of the anger she has is focused on T. Ray. At those moments she truly hates him.

            Many people associate a certain time or feeling with a certain sound. For Lily, a sound for misery is the gun shot that replays itself in her mind. That sound changed her life. If it had never happened, Lily could be living far away from T. Ray and with her mother. A quote that illustrates this is when she says, “The sound had torn through the room and gouged our hearts”(17).  Lily uses very strong language in this part to show her pain. The word ‘gouged’ is a standout here. The dictionary definition is “to cut or scoop out” (The American Heritage Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus, 331). It is as if a part of her and T. Ray was taken away when the gun had fired. This part of her being taken away causes her to see and feel her pain from everything.

            Self-pity is a feeling that is natural in humans. What Lily feels isn’t quite self-pity though. She pities herself because she has to live with killing her mother, but she also pities others because of the pain that she caused them. This feeling can be classified as regret. Lily finds it coming up everywhere. “I felt that [August] knew what a lying, murderous, hating, person I really was” (71), Lily states in the book. Her pity for herself and others, and her regret puts Lily in a state where she feels that everyone knows what she did.

            The mistake that Lily made when she shot her mother haunts her without ceasing. She feels regret, disbelief, and pain related to that topic and she can’t put it out of her mind.