What This Theme Explores
Guilt and forgiveness are the twin engines of How to Make Friends with the Dark, shaping the way Tiger Tolliver understands her loss and herself. The book asks what happens when grief fuses with self-blame so completely that it feels like identity: Tiger believes she is the kind of daughter who ruins things. It also probes whether forgiveness—of June Tolliver, of Dustin "Dusty" Franklin, of Shayna Lee Franklin, and most of all of herself—can coexist with anger and betrayal. The novel ultimately frames forgiveness not as absolution that erases harm, but as a practice of seeing people’s wounds alongside their wrongs.
How It Develops
At first, guilt is small and razor-sharp: a single fight, a single sentence Tiger can’t take back. That moment metastasizes into a narrative she lives inside—“bad daughter,” “unforgivable”—and she punishes herself with rituals like wearing the lace dress that scratched their argument into her skin. Early grief is claustrophobic and punitive; forgiveness doesn’t even appear to be an option because self-condemnation feels like proof of love.
In the middle of the novel, the circle widens. Being thrust into the foster care system destabilizes every routine Tiger used to manage her pain, and guilt begins to spill outward as misdirected harm: the cruel call to Kai Henderson, lashing out at Ellen Untermeyer. Then the past resurfaces—her father’s identity and imprisonment, June’s lies—and anger complicates grief. Tiger feels betrayed by the dead and guilty for feeling betrayed, trapped in a feedback loop that keeps forgiveness out of reach.
By the end, the story shifts from punishment to complexity. Shayna arrives with her own scars, and their tentative sisterhood teaches Tiger that accountability and tenderness can exist at the same time. June’s video reframes secrecy as fear rather than malice, and Tiger’s first call to Dusty suggests that forgiveness can begin long before resolution is possible. The theme resolves not into neat closure but into a steadier willingness to live with what can’t be fixed.
Key Examples
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Tiger’s last words to June (see “9:21 P.M.”) become the axis of her self-hatred. Because those words are the last thing she ever said, she treats them as her true self revealed, converting a moment into a verdict. The weight of that belief drives her to wear the lace dress as penance, making guilt a physical habit.
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June’s video (“65 Days, 17 Hours”) reframes the past through confession. June’s story of abandonment and fear doesn’t excuse secrecy, but it explains her control and closeness, allowing Tiger to see a mother acting from terror as much as love. Forgiveness begins when Tiger can hold both harm and history in view.
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Shayna’s admission of addiction (“53 Days, 14 Hours”) creates mutual ground rather than a ledger of debts. By naming her shame, Shayna makes space for Tiger to name hers, and the sisters trade blame for responsibility. Their exchange shows forgiveness as collaborative truth-telling, not one-sided pardon.
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Tiger’s first conversation with Dusty (“64 Days, 16 Hours”) is a fragile truce rather than a reunion. Reaching out doesn’t erase absence or prison; it acknowledges a relationship too wounded for easy absolution. The call models forgiveness as a process that can begin before trust is restored.
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In the Grief Group, Lupe Hidalgo describes grief braided with anger after her brother’s suicide. Hearing another teen’s tangled feelings normalizes Tiger’s oscillation between sorrow, rage, and guilt. The scene underscores that forgiveness often starts with realizing your pain is not aberrant.
Character Connections
Tiger’s arc maps the movement from self-accusation to self-acceptance. She begins by turning grief into moral certainty—if she is monstrous, then the pain has a cause—only to learn that certainty is a cage. Her growth lies in trading a single story (“I’m the bad daughter”) for a complex one in which she can regret, repair, and remain loved.
June embodies the person who must be forgiven without being simplified. Her secrecy harms Tiger, but her video reveals a child-turned-mother trying to outmaneuver abandonment. The book refuses to choose between accountability and compassion: June can be wrong and worthy at once.
Shayna challenges Tiger’s assumption that damage disqualifies you from family. By arriving with her own guilt and choosing transparency over denial, she models a form of love that keeps showing up while telling the truth. Dusty’s presence tests whether forgiveness can precede redemption; the call suggests that sometimes forgiveness begins as openness, not absolution. Even Kai—hurt by Tiger’s lashing out—shows how grief can ripple harm into friendship, reminding Tiger that making amends is part of forgiving herself.
Symbolic Elements
The lace dress distills guilt into fabric. It scratches, stains, and frays as Tiger clings to it, turning self-reproach into costume and constraint; when Teddy finally gets her to take it off (“53 Days, 12 Hours”), the gesture reads as a bodily act of self-forgiveness, not a simple wardrobe change.
The Jellymobile, stolen and crashed, turns grief into spectacle and wreckage. Because it is tied to her life with June, destroying it dramatizes Tiger’s fear that she ruins what she loves—an externalization of the story she’s been telling herself.
The phone shifts from shrine to bridge. At first it’s a relic to replay the past—voicemails as ritual punishment—then it becomes the conduit for June’s testimony and Tiger’s tentative outreach. The same object that feeds fixation also enables release.
Contemporary Relevance
In a culture quick to demand “closure,” the novel insists that guilt after loss is both common and complicated—especially for teens negotiating autonomy with parents whose rules might be rooted in their own trauma. It validates anger at the dead without making anger a betrayal, and it reframes forgiveness as an act of rigorous empathy that includes boundaries, amends, and time. For readers navigating family secrets, addiction, incarceration, or the child welfare system, the book offers a blueprint for holding contradictions: you can name harm, keep yourself safe, and still choose grace.
Essential Quote
“The last thing I said to my mom was ‘Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?’ … Only a bad daughter would say something like that to her mom.”
This confession crystallizes Tiger’s central mistake: confusing a worst moment with a fixed identity. The novel’s work is to dismantle that equation, showing how grief exaggerates blame and how forgiveness begins when Tiger allows one terrible sentence to be a moment, not a verdict.