Book Review: You'd Be Home Now by Kathleen Glasgow
WOW. This book. As a YA book, it deals with a lot of issues that are of concern to many young people today. There’s the usual teenager and high school life concerns, like crushes and hooking up, bullying, parties, feeling alone and misunderstood, being judged and labeled by your peers, sexting, slut shaming, rebellion against authority… you name it, it's here. There’s certainly family conflict and drama. But there’s also so many bigger, broader societal problems that this book addresses. I mean, it is LOADED. There is some heavy stuff to deal with in here. I cried, and I don’t do that often when reading. But this book brought me there.
The main character, Emory, is going into her junior year of high school and lives in a place called Mill Haven. Her family is well-off, her mother the descendent of the family that built and operated the eponymous mill the town derives its name from. Emmy’s older brother, Joey, struggles with addiction, as do many other ancillary characters in this book. Within the first few pages, there is a car accident resulting in the death of a classmate and a serious injury for Emmy. While trying to just be a teenager and deal with her own problems in the aftermath of the accident, Emmy must also contend with helping her brother as best she can.
Throughout the book there’s a repeated emphasis on how often adults fail to acknowledge or attempt to downplay the many stresses that teenagers are dealing with. There are absent workaholic parents who neglect to understand their children or see what is happening in their own homes because they are never present. There are other parents who are addicts themselves and totally out of the picture. There are teachers who are disconnected from the lives and interests of the students in front of them. Yet there are other adult characters who do make the effort to bridge that generational divide, or ultimately come around and do.
The narrative incorporates things like texts and social media posts, which contributes to the authenticity of the story and the characters. In one of these social media posts, the teenage author “Mis_Educated” reflects on “how heartbreaking it is to be us sometimes. How heartbreaking it is to be young sometimes. I don’t think adults get that. I don’t think they see that. I think they’ve forgotten that” (118). In a later post, Mis_Educated asks, “do you ever feel that adults never really listen to you? You say, I am sad and they say, what for? You’re sixteen! What do you have to be so sad about?... It all runs together, words drifting into unhearing ears. It’s like they don’t remember what it’s like to be us, to be sad, lonely, heartbroken, afraid, sometimes all at once. They say we should get over it, bounce back, be positive. It’s like they don’t remember what it’s like to be young. They’ve had a lifetime to paper over their wounds, ours are still fresh, and bleeding” (118). OOF.
Sitting in a guidance counselor’s office, Emmy reflects that instead of cheesy inspirational quotes, she wishes the counselor had more honest posters up on her walls like “good job for getting out of bed! Yay, you brushed your hair! Hooray, you got a C! Your brother didn’t die of an overdose, go you!” (95). It’s okay to just get through the day, and I think a lot of adults and teachers do forget how hard it is just to do that sometimes. There is often so much pressure on teens to be positive, to aim high, to be better, to improve, to achieve more, that we forget to just let teenagers BE. Let them vent, let them do nothing sometimes, let them make mistakes. Acknowledge that their problems and concerns are valid, even if we as "older and wiser" adults think they seem trivial or blown out of proportion.
Anyone who has lived with, loved, or tried to help an addict get or stay clean can relate to Emmy's struggles. It is hard to watch someone you know and love struggle with addiction. To drop them off at rehab, to hope that they stay clean, to feel heartbroken and scared when they relapse and/or disappear, to feel defeated and scared to be optimistic when the cycle of them trying to get clean starts again. But as the book says “you get up every day and try to love your people, even if they make it hard. Because what else do you have in the end?” (351). Hope is something that is hard to hang on to when it comes to addiction, but it’s something that this book makes it clear that we must hold on to, no matter what happens or how hard it might be. Because when it comes to helping someone suffering from addiction, “the only thing you know is to never stop hoping” (304).
I know addicts. People I grew up with, family members, close friends, ex-boyfriends... I’ve dropped people off at and visited rehabs and detoxes and halfway houses. I’ve had things stolen from me so drugs could be purchased. I’ve searched the streets for missing people. I’ve gone to funerals for friends and family that I’ve lost to this illness. Addiction eats people whole. It consumes them until you think there’s nothing else left of the person you knew before. I’ve seen it touch and destroy so many people around me, from all walks of life. It does not discriminate. As Kathleen Glasgow states in the author’s note, “the face of addiction is you and me and everyone” (380). It is up to all of us to collectively address and help solve this crisis.
And I think that’s also one of the most important takeaways from this story as well. There is such a stigma attached to those suffering from addiction, both in this book and in real life. I’ve seen firsthand how people dehumanize addicts and write them off as lost causes, who talk about them as if they’re disgusting and better off dead. The members of Emmy’s community refer to the homeless addicts who live in encampments around their town as “ghosties.” There’s a sense that these people are ghosts of their former selves who have already been written off by the community as dead and gone.
But addicts are still people. They need to be treated with compassion and they need help. Actual, real help. What is not helpful is to treat them like lepers or rejects and to give up on them entirely. It can be hard, especially when an addict has lied to you, stolen from you, betrayed you… but you need to remember the person, not the addiction. And this book does its part to make it clear, as Emmy’s dad says, that “restricting addictive substances to be punitive or pious… doesn’t solve anything” (328).
These are broader societal problems right now, not just in this plot or isolated communities. Addiction is a major public health crisis. I live near Boston, where we have a “tent city” on what is referred to as “Mass and Cass” or “Methadone Mile.” The descriptions of the “ghostie” encampment vividly reminded me of driving through this area of Boston and seeing this up close in real life. Those of us who have worked in places like urban public libraries have also seen the effects of homelessness and addiction in the form of patrons who seek refuge in the public library space. I’ve sat in staff meetings where librarians pleaded for social workers to be hired to help these patrons and connect them with the services they need. And I'll tell you now, there are NOT enough resources or services available.
I’ve seen this stuff up close, as I’m sure many of you have in your own communities. It’s real. It’s growing. We can’t normalize it, just accept it as an inevitable part of modern society. We can’t dehumanize others. We can’t look away. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist and not deal with it. This book doesn’t let the reader or characters look away. Emmy’s mother wants to look away, but her family forces her to confront the harsh reality in front of her and take real action to help.
One of the overarching themes in this book is empathy, making the effort to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see things from their perspective. This is emphasized a lot in the form of “backstories.” Characters are judged by single moments or decisions, just like people are in real life. But that isn’t the whole person, that one moment is not their entire life or true, whole self. So often today people are quick to judge others based on single actions, but really there are “millions of infinite things that add up to a whole” (324).
Everybody has their issues and baggage, whether that’s an addiction or something else. Whether they make it known or not, everyone has reasons why every day can be a challenge to get through. You never know what someone else is going through or who might need you to reach out a helping hand, and this book makes it a point to keep reminding the reader of this. If you take anything away from this story, I hope it's that. That you strive to be empathetic in interactions with others, especially when it comes to people who are struggling with things you might not understand or be comfortable around. Because empathy is the only thing that is going to help us address and tackle many of the problems we as a society face today.
Learn more about the book and read other reader reviews over on Goodreads.
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