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The truth is like the waiting jaws of a monster, a more menacing monster than I’ll ever be. It yawns beneath your feet, and you can’t escape it, and as soon as you drop, it chews you to pieces. Of course it had sort of half occurred to me that my mother had been afraid of me, but it felt way more likely to be true now that someone else had put the words around it.
Throughout Bones and All, Maren struggles to confront the reality of her situation, escaping instead into literature and daydreams and relying on comfortable truths. When her mother abandons her, she assumes that she did so because she grew tired of having to move across the country in order to conceal Maren’s cannibalistic actions. Lee, however, prefers to confront things directly and to speak honestly even when his words can be hurtful. While driving, he points out to Maren that her mother had likely grown to fear her due to her cannibalism and might have left Maren to avoid becoming one of her victims. Maren is horrified by this idea, and in the rest stop of a highway service station, she cries for several minutes. Though Maren embarks on a journey to her father in order to learn the truth about herself, here she acknowledges the pain that can come with honesty. In a metaphor, she compares the concept of “truth” to the jaws of a “monster.” Now that she knows the truth, she cannot escape from that knowledge, even though it pains her.
I curled myself up in his sleeping bag and didn’t answer. It was stupid even to imagine that somebody could give me absolution without knowing what I’d done.”
“You think you’re looking for the truth, Maren,” Lee said as I tossed and turned” [...]But if you’d rather live inside some preacher’s little bubble of sunshine and certainty, then you might as well call it what it is.”
While driving to Minnesota, Maren is captivated by a Christian sermon delivered on the radio by a man named Reverend Figtree. Figtree calls out to the listeners to turn to the church and to find forgiveness for their sins, promising that Christian forgiveness extends to all sinners. While Maren fantasizes about going to the church and being absolved of all the cannibalistic acts she has committed, Lee scoffs at her interest in religion, and in religion broadly. Further, he argues that Christian forgiveness could never extend to eaters, and that the parishioners of the church would consider Hell “too good” for someone who eats human flesh. Though dejected, Maren feels that Lee is correct. When he tauntingly offers to drive her to the church so that she can confess to cannibalism, she rejects his offer, feeling that she could never openly admit to committing crimes, and that her crimes are ultimately too severe to ever be forgiven. Lee continues to taunt Maren for her tendency to retreat into comforting fantasies. He notes the contrast between her apparent quest for “truth,” which leads her to find her father in Minnesota to better understand her own background, and her desire to “live inside some preacher’s little bubble of sunshine and certainty.” Lee, then, suggests that Maren must accept that the comforting promises of religion are out of reach to eaters.
I shut my eyes and breathed in the smell of him lingering in the sheets. When he held me, everything had melted away, everything dark and ugly and rotten inside of me. Lee had made me pure. He’d let me do it. But I lay in bed for a long time, wishing with all my hear that he hadn’t. Now his name was written there too.
Throughout the story, Maren feels profoundly guilty of her cannibalistic actions, even though she feels that they are beyond her control, and she wonders if her crimes can ever be forgiven. As a child, she sees a sign in a police station urging criminals to confess to their misdeeds, as the truth will set them “free” from the burden of carrying secret guilt. When Maren hears a radio preacher promise that sins can be forgiven through the church, she contemplates attending a sermon, though Lee argues that cannibals cannot expect any forgiveness. Later, she even writes a letter confessing to every murder she has committed, though Lee discourages her from sending it to the police station. At the end of the novel, however, Maren consumes Lee after he embraces her in bed. Rather than feeling guilty, as she has throughout the novel, she feels that Lee “let” her eat him, and that in embracing her, he purified her of everything that is “dark and ugly and rotten” in her. Though it comes at a steep personal cost, Maren believes that Lee has freed her from her feelings of guilt and shame by accepting her cannibalism and even permitting himself to be cannibalized. After she consumes Lee, she is able to confront her cannibalistic urges more honestly and directly, ultimately embracing her condition and deliberately hunting down future victims.
