For me it's not rhetoric.
From the link in the OP...
Seems she was finally on the right track, but like most of the stories I hear, something keeps drawing them back to where they grew up.In an interview with the Charlotte Observer, she recalled her journey from child refugee to high school dropout to McDonald's worker to the edge of pop culture fame. She spoke of her troubled teenaged years, in which he regularly skipped school and got into fights. She ended up getting her GED right before she was cast on the show.