Her parents are devastated over her illness. Reminding her of her childhood fascination with death, she realizes that she may die from this illness.
How could a being which she had always worshiped disappoint her so much? Then Annie gets sick. She starts to think that she has never loved her mom and never will. This acceptance is accompanied by bitterness. She is her own being, however unhappy she may be with that truth. Over time, she begins to re-frame her beliefs about existence. She attempts to do this with her peers, but alas is never successful. Forbidden from identifying with her mom any longer, she searches for someone else to whom she can intertwine her identity. The thought of not being allowed to be the same being as her mother anymore is unbearable to her because it's incompatible with her entire view of reality, so she essentially throws an existential fit. In school Annie is faced with an existential crisis. After hinting for a while that things are changing and that Annie should outgrow her dependency upon and identification with her mom, Annie Senior finally pushes her away into school and adolescence. This false conception of identity is shattered dramatically when Annie reaches age twelve or so and is sent to a boarding school. In Annie's mind this translates to her actually being a carbon miniature of her mother, whose experience she worships as a perfect and divine form of herself. They bathe together, dress identically, and spend all of their time together. Unfortunately this leads to an astonishing level of dependency to the point where Annie is developmentally delayed in learning to distinguish herself and her identity from that of her mother's. The two are inseparable when Annie is a small child.
To begin with, Annie has an enviable relationship with her mother. Over the course of the book, she relates in relatively immature though not simplistic terms how she learned to form her identity and her views on reality. She is a precocious girl within her own mind but really a very nervous, excitable person. Annie John is written from the perspective of the book's namesake as she grows up from the age of ten well into her teenage years. Jamaica Kincaid has blessed us with a beautifully insightful story about false identity construction as it relates to childhood which somehow manages to be neither a cliche nor demeaning.
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