As she’s telling what she sees as etiological truth, even though the monologue seems sincere and unaffected and at least a B+ on the overall AA-story lucidity-scale, faces in the hall are averted and heads clutched and postures uneasily shifted in empathetic distress at the look-what-happened-to-poor-me invitation implicit in the tale, the talk’s tone of self-pity itself less offensive (even though plenty of these White Flaggers, Gately knows, had personal childhoods that made this girl’s look like a day at Six Flags Over the Poconos) than the subcurrent of explanation, an appeal to exterior
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So, this is kind of the worst example of tortured prose in the book - it's difficult to follow and not rewarding to untangle. But, the AA audience is more upset that this speaker used her childhood trauma as an excuse for becoming an addict instead of being upset that such an awful trauma (which is exceptionally unpleasant and hard to justify being included) happened in the first place.
