Content Warning: This section discusses racism, addiction, depression, sex trafficking, wrongful commitment to and medical abuse of patients in a psychiatric hospital, anti-gay bias, suicide, and murder.

Connie is the heroine of the novel. She is a Mexican American woman and has had a difficult and traumatic life that exemplifies The Intersectional Nature of Feminist Struggle. She was born into a family of impoverished immigrants, but despite a lack of family support, she won a scholarship to college. However, she lost her scholarship after she became pregnant and had an abortion—an experience that speaks to the systemic nature of misogyny. Poverty and racism have also shaped Connie’s experiences. Her first husband, Martín, died in a street fight. Her second, Eddie, abandoned her and her child, Angelina. She was briefly happy with her lover Claud, who treated her and Angelina well, but he was arrested for pickpocketing and died in prison as a result of medical experimentation. Connie sank into a deep depression and became addicted to alcohol, eventually hitting Angelina and losing her to the foster care system.

As the novel begins, Connie therefore feels despair over her chances of ever having a happy life again. She sees herself as worn out and worthless—“a fat Chicana aged thirty-seven without a man, without her own child, without the right clothes, with her plastic pocketbook cracked on the side and held together with tape” (26).