Overview
Trisha McFarland, a nine-year-old baseball addict, adores her doll Mona, her closest friend Pepsi, and her Red Sox cap signed by relief pitcher Tom Gordon. Trisha lives with her mother, Quilla, and brother Pete, who have been feuding since Quilla’s divorce from Pete and Trisha’s father, Larry. Quilla and Pete’s continual squabbles make Trisha feel invisible. Trisha can’t take their fighting while on a family trip along a part of the Appalachian Trail. Unnoticed by anyone, she slips off the route to relieve herself.
Trisha tries to take a shortcut back to the route, but after being turned around, she realizes she’s lost and in danger. All she has in her hiking pack is her Walkman and a limited bit of food and drink, and night is quickly approaching. As she walks through the darker woods, Trisha uses her Walkman to listen to local radio station WCAS and follow the Red Sox’s road trip across the United States. She is especially interested in the performance of pitcher Tom Gordon, a favorite of her father. She and Larry both admire Tom Gordon’s extraordinary quiet on the pitch, as well as the “icewater” serenity that runs through his veins.
As Trisha navigates her first few days in the woods, she relies on snippets of advice from her loved ones and her active imagination. She pretends to speak aloud to Tom Gordon as she tries to make her way back to the trail, unknowing that she is growing increasingly disoriented. She begins following a creek after recalling from a Little House on the Prairie book that water leads to civilization. Along the way, she gets the impression that someone is observing her.
The river ultimately fades into a marsh, which Trisha carefully traverses, channeling the bravery of her baseball idol. She unwittingly makes several wrong turns and becomes seriously ill after drinking stream water when her own supply runs out. Disappointed, Trisha wonders if there is a God watching out for her. After consuming the hallucinogenic leaves of a checkerberry plant, she experiences a vision of three robed figures, each claiming to represent a higher authority. The third figure is the God of the Lost, an irrationally terrible entity who has been observing and following Trisha through the woods.
Trisha’s struggle for survival worsens as she spends more time in the elements. She develops double pneumonia and begins to hallucinate, convinced that the God of the Lost is hunting her and waiting for the perfect moment to consume her. The Red Sox games on her Walkman are her sole solace, and she imagines Tom Gordon by her side as she pushes her feeble body forward. He teaches her the secret to winning games: never doubt yourself in front of your opponent. As Trisha’s faith wanes, Tom Gordon tells her that he points to the sky during games because God frequently intervenes in the bottom of the ninth inning. Trisha eventually realizes that the world may be a sad and frightening place, yet she refuses to give up hope. Tom Gordon guides her down a route that eventually leads her in the correct direction.
After eight days in the woods, Trisha emerges onto a road used by trucks. Before she can celebrate her redemption, a black bear approaches from the woods; Trisha believes it is the God of the Lost in disguise. Despite her trepidation, she channels Tom Gordon’s stillness and remains completely still. When the God of the Lost charges her, she adopts Gordon’s pitching position and throws the Walkman at the bear’s face, striking it between the eyes. A hunter emerges from the woods and shoots the bear, which retreats back into the woods. Trisha collapses, fatigued but proud of her accomplishment.
Trisha awakens in the hospital, her family gathers around her. Her Red Sox cap sits nearby, Tom Gordon’s signature reduced to a smear. Her nurse leads the family out of the room because Trisha’s vital signs are increasing, but Trisha catches her father’s attention and motions for him to put the cap on her head. Trisha touches the brim and points up, emulating Tom Gordon’s characteristic victory gesture—she’s won the game.
Chapter 1
These chapters introduce readers to Trisha McFarland, the novel’s lively nine-year-old protagonist. On the surface, Trisha appears to be a typical all-American child—she lives in the suburbs, enjoys baseball, and goes on sack lunches with her mother and brother. Her family dynamics are far from perfect, as is obvious from the start. Her parents have divorced, and her brother Pete is dealing with the new division in their family. He and Quilla are always at odds, and Trisha feels like “weak glue” attempting to keep them together. She tries to smooth over their disagreements by suppressing her own emotions and being artificially cheery. She, too, is fighting behind her pleasant facade. The frequent squabbling makes Trisha feel unloved and invisible. She suspects that no one is looking out for her, which is verified when her mother fails to notice her abandoning the hiking track.
Trisha’s daydream in the car provides insight into how she uses her vivid imagination to escape the unpleasant facts of reality. This attribute will be useful later in her time in the woods. Her automobile daydream anticipates how her imagination will later allow her to escape feelings of loneliness and dread by immersing herself in an endless fantasy world.
The novel’s first sentence makes it clear that Trisha will soon be lost in the woods. King employs an omniscient third-person narrator who is already familiar with Trisha’s entire story. This point of view provides the reader with information that Trisha does not yet have, raising the suspense when Trisha makes poor judgments without realizing it.
When Trisha deviates from the route, her problems escalate. From the minute she feels the first “minnowy flutter” of unease, King immerses her in a new and dangerous realm. For the first time, Trisha’s interaction with the natural world is explored. Everything in the woods appears hostile, from the branches that resemble severed arms to the insects that swarm constantly around her. Her condition appears to be dreadful from the start, as she is confronted with unknown and hostile circumstances.
King constructs The Girl Who Loved. Tom Gordon watches a game of baseball, Trisha’s favorite sport. The first chapter, before Trisha goes missing, is titled Pregame. In Chapter 2, “First Inning,” Trisha deviates from the route. The chapter names imply that Trisha’s “game” begins when she leaves the protection of the Appalachian Trail and ends after the ninth inning, leaving the reader to wonder if she will win.
Initially, Trisha tries to remain cool after discovering she is lost. Her collapse near the close of Chapter 3, “Second Inning,” reminds the reader that she is a child—a mature child, but nonetheless a child caught in a frightening circumstance. Her apprehension is exacerbated by a frigid voice in her thoughts that expresses every doubt and worst-case scenario. Trisha communicates with this voice, telling it to shut up. Her conversations with her inner critic demonstrate her active imagination and how it helps her comprehend her situation.
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Chapter 2
In these chapters, King emphasizes the gravity of Trisha’s condition. She’s been lost for several days, and her food and water supply is running low. In addition to the threat of the weather, Chapter 7, “Fifth Inning,” introduces a new opponent in the form of a spiteful “something” who chases Trisha through the woods, ruining her food supply and watching her sleep. The strange and terrifying creature represents Trisha’s worries of abandonment and death. Its presence heightens the danger in the woods, distorting her perspective to the point where even the moon appears menacing. She is realizing that the worst portions of her life in Sanford are nothing compared to the dangers of the woods, indicating that her hardship has begun to mature her beyond her years.
As the difficulties grow, Trisha must rise to face them. She continues to seek counsel from various aspects of her life, including her family, instructors, and even a remembered passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1935). She must also rely on her own courage and trust her survival instincts, while feeling entirely out of her element in her unusual circumstances. Her vivid imagination keeps her grounded, allowing her to take delight in simple acts like forming mud with her fingers. It also allows her to explore and express different aspects of herself through various fictitious personalities. One of them is the “tough tootsie,” the sneering girl who Trisha believes is the source of the negative voice in her thoughts. Trisha’s swearing at the tough tootsie is a significant character feature. Trisha is often someone who “[goes] along to get along,” but chooses to confront the imaginary girl and defend herself. She then imagines swearing at Pete, a departure from her upbeat demeanor at the beginning of the tale. Ironically, Trisha has more freedom to be herself in the woods than she did while playing the role of family mediator.
Trisha’s other coping method is to imagine Tom Gordon’s presence. Their chats allow her to filter her views through the prism of an authority figure and role model; Trisha does not completely trust herself out in the woods, but she does trust Tom Gordon. Tom Gordon informs her that in order to win a game, you must show your opponent that you are in charge. If the difficult tootsie reflects Trisha’s doubts, Tom Gordon represents her self-belief. Although Trisha is the only person physically present in several of these chapters, her imagination fills the story with a recurring cast of characters. She speaks aloud to herself and Tom Gordon, continually recalling happier moments with her family or adopting witty phrases from her peers, making her solitude appear less severe.
The concept of faith is strong throughout these chapters. King underlines that Trisha’s secular background has made it difficult for her to connect with her faith. This is seen when she attempts but fails to pray for salvation. Trisha has no clear understanding of God or whether she can rely on a force outside of herself to watch out for her. Her father’s explanation of the Subaudible offers an alternative to faith in a typical God figure, but Trisha finds little consolation in the concept of a beneficent entity with limited authority. Instead, she decides to put her faith in baseball. King imbues the game with a metaphysical element through Trisha’s belief that the fate of the Red Sox is linked to her own prospects of survival. Her conviction that she will be saved if Tom Gordon rescues the game demonstrates how essential the sport is to her; it provides her something to hope for when everything else seems unclear. After Tom Gordon rescues the game, Trisha imitates his hallmark winning gesture by looking upward at “something [that] felt like God”, her confidence in a higher power seems to be strengthened by her symbolically rekindled hope of survival.
Trisha’s confrontations with nature become more serious in these chapters. The stream she’s been following widens into a bog, which she needs to wade across carefully. Her food source is running low, and she becomes so dehydrated that she has no alternative but to drink from a nearby stream, which makes her extremely ill. It feels like her surroundings are punishing her, but the truth is that the woods are dangerous for anyone without survival training, let alone a nine-year-old girl. The omniscient narrator conveys to the reader that the police search for Trisha has gone off course, raising the stakes even higher. King continues to utilize dramatic irony to highlight the scary conditions and heighten the dramatic tension.
Chapter 3
At the opening of Chapter 8, “Sixth Inning,” Trisha’s morale has plummeted. The logical half of her believes she will perish in the woods as her health deteriorates and her supplies deplete. Still, she continues on, refusing to give up her slim hope of survival. Despite her tumultuous relationship with her environment, Trisha has periods of calm and joy when she appreciates nature. By juxtaposing the grandeur of natural occurrences such as meteor showers with the brutality of sights such as dismembered deer, King expresses the idea that nature is a complex force that encompasses both beauty and danger.
As her predicament worsens, Trisha contemplates the darkest aspects of existence. While in the woods, she has encountered many unpleasant and frightening situations, but it is her father’s lonely life that eventually convinces her that life is unhappy and unfair. Although she has seen Pete rally against this injustice, Trisha wonders if it isn’t preferable to accept it as a fact of life. She refers to herself as “almost ten, and big for her age” . Trisha has used this phrase to describe herself previously. When it first appeared, it was essentially physical, but its reappearance following Trisha’s admission demonstrates her growing emotional maturity. At the age of nine, she has embraced a terrible reality that many adults find difficult to bear. The arrest of Francis Raymond Mazzerole, the pedophile wrongfully accused of kidnapping Trisha, parallels Trisha’s acceptance of life’s unfairness and the difficulty of dealing with its challenges. The police’ pursuit of Mazzerole has slowed the hunt for Trisha; Mazzerole is clearly bad, but in Trisha’s case, he is also a dangerous distraction. Although Mazzerole and Trisha never meet, he serves as a reminder of the evil lurking in everyday life.
Trisha’s connection with the robed beings reflects her mixed thoughts about faith. Tom Gordon’s God is too busy to care about her, adding to her dread that she will be alone in the world with no one to look out for her. The Subaudible wants to aid her, but it is too feeble. After so many days of misery and dread, it’s understandable that Trisha believes there isn’t much good in the world. The fact that her weak power resembles her father indicates Larry McFarland’s inadequate parenting, as he is too preoccupied with his own troubles to be the father Trisha deserves. The God of the Lost leaves the most lasting impression on Trisha. It confirms all of her greatest worries, informing her that the world is a dark place and that she belongs among the lost. Until now, the novel’s horror genre elements had been hinted at, but God of the Lost adds a specific, supernatural, and sinister opponent into the plot. Although she can accept that some aspects of life are unhappy, Trisha is astonished and outraged when the God of the Lost declares that the fundamental core of the earth is evil.
As Trisha’s illness progresses, she begins to hallucinate more frequently. King uses Trisha’s feverish state of mind to blur the line between dream and reality, instilling dread in the novel with her horrible visions. Because of Trisha’s condition, the characters in her imagination become more real, particularly Tom Gordon, who transforms from an imagined voice to a nearly constant and visible strolling companion. Trisha continues to go to him for advice and comfort. As the tough tootsie discourages her and the God of the Lost chases her menacingly, Tom Gordon continues to embody Trisha’s intelligence, resourcefulness, and refusal to give up. This resolute side of her character eventually takes her to the dirt road, the first sign of true optimism in days.
King proceeds to arrange Trisha’s story around a baseball game. During one of their chats, Tom Gordon tells Trisha that God usually “comes on in the bottom of the ninth”. As each chapter is titled after a baseball inning, this proclamation suggests that Trisha may find salvation in the book’s penultimate chapter. For the time being, however, he tells her that it is “late innings”—the “game” is almost done. Trisha’s belief that the God of the Lost is approaching her reflects this feeling. Even while the “Seventh Inning Stretch” provides Trisha with a little respite in the shape of new hope and echoes the typical break in a baseball game, the reader knows that play will soon resume and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is rising to its conclusion.
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Chapter 4
In the “late innings” of Trisha’s story, the baseball games on her Walkman are the only thing keeping her sane and hopeful. She is heartbroken when the batteries in her Walkman die, since she has lost her link to Tom Gordon as well as her escape from reality. She is extremely ill with what will eventually be identified as double pneumonia and can barely function. Her physical and mental decline are paralleled by the God of the Lost’s steady approach to her, indicating that she is extremely close to death. For the first time, Trisha sees her idol Tom Gordon looking afraid in the final minutes before her Walkman dies, emphasizing the gravity of her plight.
Despite being critically ill and having lost her connection to the outer world, Trisha refuses to lose herself. She keeps shrieking at the God of the Lost, hoping to scare it away. In the midst of one of her worst periods in the woods, she soothes herself by glancing at her Red Sox cap, which symbolizes her tenacity and her bond with Tom Gordon and her father.
Chapter 13 is titled “Bottom of the Ninth”. In Chapter 9, “Top of the Seventh,” Tom Gordon told Trisha that God usually comes on in the bottom of the ninth inning, hinting that her rescue will happen in this chapter. Even though her faith has been challenged, she remains hopeful for a miracle as she walks along the trail with the last of her energy. Her dreams are rewarded when she comes across a trucker-friendly lane that intersects the busy New Hampshire Route 66. The God who comes to Trisha at the end of this chapter, however, is not merciful, but rather the God of the Lost, who finally appears to confront her face to face. This twist both fulfills King’s foreshadowing and surprises the reader. It is time for Trisha to confront her worries and try to end the game.
