What This Theme Explores
Mental Health and Coping Mechanisms in How to Make Friends with the Dark asks what survival looks like when an adolescent’s world collapses. Through protagonist Tiger Tolliver and her mother June Tolliver, the book examines grief not as a diagnosis to cure but as a force one must learn to carry. It probes the messy, contradictory ways people try to keep going—rituals that become armor, anger that turns outward, and, slowly, healthier practices that make the pain shareable. The novel insists that the “dark” can’t be banished; it can be acknowledged, named, and lived with—most powerfully through connection.
How It Develops
Before the death, the novel seeds the theme in the quiet pressures of everyday life. Early chapters like Chapter 1 show June’s headaches and hidden bills as adult coping strategies that bleed into parenting: overprotectiveness becomes a way to manage old wounds. Tiger’s mental equilibrium depends on her mother’s, and her own coping is compliance with flashes of minor rebellion—an identity formed in response to another person’s fear.
In the immediate aftermath of loss, the story turns inward. Across Chapter 5 to Chapter 6, Tiger enters shock and dissociation, feeling like a “girl-bug in a jar,” and adopts avoidant rituals: refusing to eat, and wearing the lace dress as both penance and talisman. These behaviors are not solutions; they’re attempts to hold time still at the last moment she could imagine her world intact.
Placement in the foster system magnifies hurt into volatility. In sequences around Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, profound loneliness and instability accelerate Tiger’s destructive coping—lashing out, slapping Ellen Untermeyer, and getting drunk before crashing the Jellymobile. The novel edges toward the “black hole” of despair and suicidal ideation, only to show how a single tether—a frantic call with Cake—can interrupt the slide.
Healing begins not with epiphany but with language, labor, and people. From Chapter 9 to Chapter 12, a grief group offers a lexicon for loss; friendships with Thaddeus Roach and Mae-Lynn Carpenter ground Tiger in shared experience; work with horses gives her body something to do besides hold pain. Learning about her sister, Shayna Lee Franklin, reframes family as something she can build, shifting Tiger from mere endurance to fragile agency. The arc never promises “recovery”—only a livable rhythm with the dark.
Key Examples
The novel juxtaposes avoidance and harm with emergent, sustainable practices to show that coping is both intuitive and learned, private and communal. Each example reveals how Tiger’s behaviors either try to control the uncontrollable or open a door to naming and sharing grief.
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Wearing the dress: Donning the ivory lace dress becomes Tiger’s most visible ritual, a knot of self-punishment, fidelity, and armor. It keeps her fused to the moment of rupture even as others recognize its burden. Teddy’s recognition reframes the dress as a story she can choose to end.
“That dress you came in with? My God, that dress oozed pain. I could barely hold it, Tiger. Whatever the story is behind that dress? You are ready to write ‘the end,’ my girl.”
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Violence and anger: Slapping Ellen Untermeyer externalizes what Tiger cannot yet say; pain seeks a surface. The act is less about Ellen than about making the invisible visible—a bid to be witnessed that still leaves Tiger isolated.
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Substance use and recklessness: With Lupe Hidalgo, Tiger drinks to erase feeling and crashes the Jellymobile. This rock-bottom moment converts inward collapse into public wreckage, exposing the limits—and costs—of numbing strategies.
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Suicidal ideation: When she and Cake Rishworth call it “the S word,” the euphemism both distances and names the danger. Cake’s urgent intervention becomes a narrative hinge, illustrating how a human voice can interrupt the pull of the “black hole.”
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The grief group (GG): In community, Tiger learns grief is not a problem to solve but a condition to name and share. The group’s vocabulary—like Mae-Lynn’s “Big Suck”—validates permanence without foreclosing possibility, replacing isolation with mutual recognition.
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Creative and physical outlets: Working with horses at Randy Gonzalez’s ranch gives Tiger nonverbal regulation and purpose. Physical labor and focused care widen her world beyond the self, anchoring her body when her mind spirals.
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Building new relationships: Trusting Thaddeus, Mae-Lynn, and eventually Shayna creates a “found family” that redistributes the weight of loss. These bonds don’t erase pain; they make it survivable.
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Seeking the truth: Pursuing her mother’s past and searching for her father converts grief into inquiry. Even when answers hurt, the act of seeking reclaims agency and knits identity from fractured history.
Character Connections
Tiger’s journey maps a spectrum of coping—from fusion with her mother’s routines, to isolating rituals, to explosive externalization, to grounded, communal strategies. The moment she chooses to remove the dress is emblematic: she does not discard grief, but she relinquishes a coping tool that has become a cage, making space for practices that let her rejoin the world.
Shayna’s arc mirrors and complicates Tiger’s. She copes with neglect, abuse, and an abortion through alcohol, then fights for sobriety and chooses guardianship. By tethering herself to responsibility rather than oblivion, she models how purpose can become a corrective practice—an adult version of “making friends with the dark.”
June’s overprotectiveness is revealed as a legacy coping mechanism born of her own childhood losses. She tries to preempt Tiger’s pain by containing her world, a loving strategy that also narrows Tiger’s resilience when loss finally arrives.
The grief group members embody plural paths: Lupe’s brash exterior masks a brother’s suicide; Mae-Lynn’s fatalism gives her language if not comfort; twins Taran and Alif counter instability by leaning on each other. Together, they argue against any single “right way” to grieve, and for the indispensability of witness.
Symbolic Elements
The Dark: The title’s “dark” is not antagonistic so much as ambient—grief as a constant atmosphere. “Making friends” names the shift from resistance to accommodation, the ethical move from denial to coexistence.
The Dress: The ivory lace dress condenses guilt, loyalty, and stasis into a single object. Wearing it until it frays makes grief visible; taking it off marks a pivot from self-punishment toward acceptance.
The Black Hole: Introduced by Thaddeus as a metaphor for suicidal despair, the black hole explains why proximity feels both magnetic and annihilating. Cake’s intervention shows that human connection can exert a stronger gravity.
The Jellymobile: The quirky truck symbolizes mother-daughter identity—impoverished but intimate and singular. Its destruction literalizes Tiger’s implosion and signals the end of a life she cannot return to, demanding new terms for going on.
Contemporary Relevance
At a time when adolescent mental health is under intense strain, the novel refuses stigma and easy fixes. It validates anger, numbness, and self-sabotage without endorsing them, and then models how language, labor, and community redistribute grief’s weight. For readers who feel alone inside loss, Tiger’s arc offers both recognition and a practical ethic: you do not have to “get over” it; you need people, words, and time to carry it. The book’s realism—and its bridging to resources—makes it a humane companion for contemporary teens and the adults who care for them.
Essential Quote
“This is what I meant when I called it the Big Suck: it’s all bullshit, and it’s never going to feel any better.”
Mae-Lynn’s formulation refuses the lie of tidy recovery while giving grief a name everyone in the room can hold. By normalizing permanence, it paradoxically reduces shame and isolation, clearing space for coping that is honest, communal, and sustainable.