It doesn’t give you a happy ending, because, well, life doesn’t. Not always. Sometimes it might make you wait a long, long time for it, and even then, it might not look like what you’d imagined.
Isabel has an earth-shattering kiss （I have recently had one of these, by the way, but we don’t have to go into that right now） with Caspar Goodwood and yes, how nice it would have been for her to go off with Caspar and not go back to Rome and to wrap the book up and give her great love and all that stuff. But she didn’t. She went back to Osmond, and to Pansy, and Henry James doesn’t really tell us why.
That, to me, is an honest and good way to end a book, because that’s exactly what real life is. It can’t be summed up tidily and neatly. You don’t know what is going to happen, or how things are going to end, and we probably get into way too much trouble trying to plan for and predict these things. But in the end, you just don’t know. My brother might come out of rehab and be okay for years and years, or maybe just a day, and then one of those thousand things working against him might win. And then we will be back to a place that’s kind of like when Caspar Goodwood says, “You must save what you can of your life,” and begin to rebuild, again.
I prefer to think of when Isabel is comforting Ralph as he is dying. Isabel says that pain is not the deepest thing and Ralph agrees, saying that pain always passes （I’m still torn on this, but I’m young, so we’ll see）。
That’s how this book spoke to me. Sometimes your life falls to ash and you sift through, waiting for the pain to pass, looking for the remnants in the debris, something to save, when really all you need is right there, inside you. And next to you, hopefully, in the form of a person. Have you read this book? Do you remember what Ralph says to Isabel as he lies dying?
Love remains.
And that’s really all you can hope for, in the end. I have to believe that. I have to hold on to that.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As Ryleigh notes early in You’d Be Home Now, more than twenty million people in the United States struggle with substance abuse each year. If you think that’s only adults, think again: that statistic begins with users at age twelve.
Twelve. And that’s only what has been documented. Because substance abuse care hasn’t been fully integrated into our health care system, the number of kids and adults currently struggling is probably much, much higher.
Right now, a family member or a friend is probably struggling with substance abuse. You might know it. You might not. You may be struggling, and keeping it a secret, because you don’t know who to tell, or how, or where to get help. Maybe you feel ashamed, like you’ve let people down. Maybe you feel, like Joey does in this book, that you’re unworthy, or a loser.
You are not any of those things. Not one bit.
Addiction is a disease, plain and simple, and should be treated as such: with care, management, and empathy. It requires hourly, daily, and lifetime diligence. I have been in recovery for nearly thirteen years at this point. It’s painful and lonely and there are days when I feel like I can’t go on anymore. But I do. I keep walking toward the future, whatever it may be. I have friends and family and a group that I trust who walk this road with me.
When we think about the twenty million people facing substance abuse disorders, we also have to think about the people not included in that number who are touched by it in some way. Family members. Friends. Schools. Communities. And when you add those people, the number of people affected by addiction rises exponentially. This is not an invisible crisis. It’s a public health crisis. It’s in your house, your town, your school. It’s sitting next to you on the bus. It’s in the face of the person who asks you for spare change outside the store. It’s the person who does your taxes, polishes your nails, takes your ticket at the movies, or tells you it’s time to register for the SATs.
The face of addiction is you and me and everyone.
I chose to write this book not from the point of view of Joey but from that of his sister, Emory. She’s watching from the outside as her brother wrestles with addiction. When I visit schools to talk about my books, I often give a writing exercise called “My Biggest Secret.” I ask students to write down the biggest secret they’ve never told anyone on a piece of paper. I don’t ask them to read it aloud, because it’s a secret, after all. When they’ve written their secret, we talk about using that as the first line of a book and how to answer the questions the secret raises, at which point the secret is no longer a secret: it belongs to fiction, and thus, a story is born.
One afternoon after students had left the school library, I was helping put chairs back into place when I saw a yellow sticky note on the floor. I picked it up.
I love my sister but I hate my sister because she is on drugs. That is all my parents care about, not me. It’s like I’m invisible.
I pinned that sticky note to my laptop when writing Emory’s story of invisibility. Because when we talk about addiction, we have to talk about collateral damage: the mental health of the kids and adults surrounding the addict. How do you live when your life has been upended by someone else’s health crisis? When you feel guilty about wanting to go to a dance, or be kissed, or go away to college, because right next to you, someone else is suffering?
Emory’s feeling of invisibility leads her to make some faulty choices, but in the end, it also awakens her to something larger: you have to make a choice to fight to help those you love survive, but you have to fight to let yourself live, too. After all, as Liza tells Emory, “And if you’re not, like, solid with yourself, how can you help somebody else?”
We need to get solid with ourselves and change the conversation surrounding addiction and mental health from a punitive one of “You did this to yourself” and “You’re weak” and “That’s not my problem” to one of empathy, compassion, and care. We need to demand full access to care for everyone, not just those lucky enough to have insurance （which is pretty meager for most people, let’s be honest）。
Because you know what? There are millions and millions of Joeys and Emorys out there, and they should not be invisible.
They live here, too.
RESOURCES
Al-Anon and Alateen
al-anon.org
Alcoholics Anonymous （AA）
aa.org
The Fix
thefix.com
Narcotics Anonymous （NA）
na.org
National Alliance on Mental Illness （NAMI） nami.org/Home
Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network （RAINN） rainn.org
Smart Recovery: Self-Management and Recovery Training smartrecovery.org
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration samhsa.gov/?find-help/?national-helpline
The Trevor Project
thetrevorproject.org
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I had a writing teacher once who told my class that you never really know how to write a book until you reach your eighth book. Gasps and despair filled the small seminar room. After all, most of us were struggling with finishing a draft of what we hoped would be our first book. An eighth book? That seemed distant and unlikely.
I’m not even close to an eighth book, but I can say You’d Be Home Now, my third book, the very one you are holding in your hands right now, was the most difficult for me to figure out how to write （and this is coming from a writer whose previous two books tackled self-harm and grief）。 It started as the seed of an idea gifted to me by Delacorte publisher Beverly Horowitz: “Why don’t you write a contemporary Our Town and focus on the opioid epidemic?”