Gloria is such a warm and engaging perspective, you just take her into your heart instantly. Merle's narrative is more disjointed so it takes a while to get as strong a sense of her as Gloria, but as the book goes on you get to see how deeply the two have been shaped by their life experiences and trauma, along with the way they are othered while institutionalised. I really liked the openness of the ending - I felt like we were shown throughout how unreasonable it is to expect people to lay out their lives, inner thoughts and deepest wounds for inspection (and how that inspection is demanded in very precise ways without any guidance) so the fact that we're left with some ambiguity felt very fitting.