Early in the novel, ten-year-old Sybylla, after spending a long morning helping to right cows who had fallen into ditches, writes in typically dramatic prose about how her great dream of being a musical star is gone: “Weariness. Weariness. This was life—my life—my career, my brilliant career” (10). In this exasperation, Sybylla decides her life has already been savaged by irony. The title reflects this overwhelming sense of despair and tells readers this is a moment of darkness for the narrator.

Franklin experiments with how to tell a story in the first-person while maintaining some distance between the reader and the narrator. First-person narrators, particularly ones as emotive and chatty as Sybylla, invite sympathy. Thus, readers share Sybylla’s bitterness and agony over the fact that her young life is now dedicated to lifting livestock out of ditches.

Yet by Franklin’s own account, the title of the manuscript that she initially submitted for publication was My Brilliant (?) Career. The inserted question mark relayed to the reader that the voice telling the story should not necessarily be confused with her own. The punctuation, which editors convinced Franklin to remove because it might confuse readers, allows for irony and knowing smile of the author who sees in her character’s handwringing despair a naïve and child-like sense of drama.