Kidd often employs hyperbole along with verbal and situational irony to show how Lily shaped her identity around her pain as a child. In this passage, Lily reflects on her past and how she exaggerated her suffering to place herself at the center of her own story:

In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional. I was the girl abandoned by her mother. I was the girl who kneeled on grits. What a special case I was.

After May’s death, Zach’s arrest, and August’s revelation that she raised Lily’s mother, Lily feels that her own traumas were very minor in comparison. The list of painful things that were wrong with her life that she provides here is intended to be self-deprecating, as though her suffering were something she gathered and arranged deliberately. She thinks about how she thought about each each hurt in the bluntest of terms—being ”abandoned by her mother” and “the girl who kneeled on grits”—so they seemed as large as possible. As she reflects on how she “loved” her “collection of hurts and wounds,” she also realizes the extent to which she defined herself by those wounds. 

The verbal and situational irony in this passage appear in the way Lily praises her own suffering. Before this moment of realization she felt her wounds made her “exceptional.” She uses verbal irony when she explains how she took pride in how much she had suffered, and what a “special case” she thought she was. The situational irony here lies in the fact that her misery harmed her, yet she treated it as something that raised her above others. She mocks her younger self because she now sees the gap between the story she told herself and the truth behind it. She’s being very harsh with herself in these final page of the novel, as she exposes her self-pity as a kind of performance.