To me after her surgery, Lauren seemed a new person. New in a sense that she felt like a normal teenager at times which was a weird feeling due to her epilepsy. Here you have a sense that she is gaining a sense of confidence after the surgery although for a while she felt abnormal when not encountering a seizure. She kept herself busy by swimming and playing volleyball, activities that she was not used to.. Its kinda weird to have all these different scenes taking place but the way its taking place you could sense that she was not used to her new found lifestyle.

The fact that she even introduced a guy in this latter part also gives a different insight on how she goes about things before and after her surgery. Before there was no sign of a male figure and her orgasms occur as a result of typing up a couple of letters when at school. When she does introduce a male, it turns out to be an extremely older guy named Christopher who for one described Lauren as “wise beyond your years” (137) and that seemed to trigger his hormones. In other people’s eye’s Lauren to me is one of those persons that are unaware at times of their surrounding or activity but nonetheless a very intelligent person. This transition from being dependent to independent is an interesting one but to see how it ends even more.

In part three, Lauren changed after she did the surgery. After the surgery Lauren doesn’t have much seizures but, sometimes she have different types of aura. The auras that she felt allow her to become a creative writer and “The next time I felt an aura descend, I went straight to my desk, straight to my notebook. Holding my pen, I wrote faster and faster” (111). Before she started her freshmen year in college she “applied to a place called Bread Loaf, a fourteen-day writers’ conference in Vermont” (113). When she got accepted she met her reader, “Christopher Marin” (119), the author who will be reading the stories that she writes.

Throughout part three, Lauren’s relationship with Christopher grew closer, which is not what she expected. Her feelings for Christopher soon turned into love; after the writers’ conference ended, they often meet each other from time to time. As their relationship grew closer, Lauren grew to love him more and more. When she wasn’t writing letters to him she says “I called him. If he wasn’t in school, I called him at him” (152). This shows that Lauren’s love for Christopher is very deep. Finally, when Lauren decide to tell Christopher that she has epilepsy, he was surprised. After he find out that she has epilepsy, she says “I don’t remember. Somehow I got back to the bus, and we said good-bye I knew for good, and I got home and I could not stop crying” (157). At the end of part three, when Christopher find out that she has epilepsy, Lauren’s relationship with Christopher ended.

Lauren has seemed to really have matured over the story thanks greatly to the surgery. Sadly although her seizures have greatly been reduced her auras have been strengthened and have in a way replaced her seizure episodes, “The auras were feelings and tastes, delights and despairs, and they wrapped me totally for the time they lasted” (110).

Although this was a new occurrence in her life she managed to still live a better life than what she original started with before the operation. Her auras worked like her seizures, traveling throughout her body, but in a more internal experience that helped to her explore her sexual side even though she was very quiet about the matter, “I was seventeen, but matters of sex so embarrassed me that I could only speak of our God-given anatomy in terms like ‘you know where,’ and ‘down there” (111). There was a positive aspect to her auras and it was that, like her seizures, it would send her into a new world the world of a writer. She became so passionate about her writing she even participated in a writer’s conference where she even reveals to a select few on how her writing came to be, “I told them about my preseizure auras, and how it was in an aura that I discovered my creativity” (119).

Her aura influenced writing garnered the attention of Christopher Marin, “very famous, with two books under his belt and a Guggenheim” (119). Sadly due to her condition it was very hard for to develop true social skills which resulted in her failed relationship with this author that was based solely on sexually compulsive behavior, “Every three weeks we met in motels in Vermont. Our encounters were seedy, our sex on synthetic carpets, polyester bedspreads, a Gideons Bible in the nightstand drawer” (149). Although emotionally broken she manages to persevere and move forward, “If only I could learn to live here, in the chasm he cut, in the void out of which our world was born, if only I could. I can.” (158). Thankfully this is an inevitable outcome due to the fact that her work ‘The Cherry Tree’ has been accepted for publication.

Here we see laura expirecing her first surgery. She explains these types of “auras” she gets when shes doing something. “The auras wer feelings of god reaching down from the sky,The auras were feelings and tastes,delight and despairs and they wrapped me totally for the time they lasted.” (Page 110) Im guessing everything that is going on is the cause of her epilepsy. Her surgery was a sucess. I didnt really understand this chapter. It was confusin.

Im guessing she was seventeen and she was already expirencing sexual contact. “Epilepsy does not mean to be possed passivelyl;it means to need posess,actively.” (Page 157) Chritopher was the guy she was having sex with and since he left and now laura felt alone trying to figure out if she can change the past.” If only i could learn to live here in the chasm he cut,in the void out of which our world was born, if only i could.

Ican.” (Page 158)