62 pages • 2 hours read
Kathleen GlasgowYou'd Be Home Now
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Water
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses substance abuse and overdose.
Water commonly symbolizes life, rebirth, and purification. However, water can also be a powerful force of destruction and trauma. When the novel opens, Emory lies trapped in a wrecked car as the rain pours down, the deluge being the cause of the accident. Furthermore, since the town of Mill Haven was built on the back of the textile industry which harnessed the power of the creek to move their machines, water emblemizes the power to create. However, each time Joey and Emory see the Mill, visible from Joey’s room, it reminds them of their family’s complicated legacy. The Mill not only polluted the creek water but when it closed, it left many people unemployed. Now, the creek has become a refugee camp for people excommunicated from Mill Haven society and Emory’s family must reckon with their role to play in helping the people who now make the defunct Mill their home.
Though water causes the tragedy, it becomes for Emory a source of comfort throughout the novel as she processes her physical and emotional trauma. For many people who experience physical limitations or who are recovering from an injury, swimming and water exercise allow them the ability to move their body safely as the water supports their body weight. In the weeks following the accident, Emory struggles to manage her pain and their pool provides not only the comfort of weightless movement but also a consoling silence to all the noise inside her head. She describes the feeling: “I bobble on my back in the pool, arms out, water lapping my cheeks, the sky dark, speckled tapestry above me” (30). While in the water Emory experiences both a type of sensory deprivation along with the sensual touch of the water on her skin. Since her parents aren’t affectionate with her, Emory longs for the comfort of someone’s touch, and the pool water envelops her like a gentle hug.
Emory also associates comfort with images of the ocean, a place that her family once enjoyed visiting for vacation. When she is in the hospital, Emory compares the numbing effects of the drugs to being in the ocean: “there’s an ocean inside me, warm and sweet, and I’m bobbing along the waves” (5). When images from the accident haunt her, Emory often summons the memory of those beach trips for comfort. The memories remind her of a simpler time before Joey became ill and when their family was whole and happy. When Emory experienced anxiety over starting high school, Joey comforted her by comparing high school to the vastness and diversity of the ocean. He sent her off by saying, “[n]ow, go swim” (94), and Emory returns to those supportive words when she returns to school after the accident. Water, the source of life, can also flood and drown, but in the novel, Glasgow employs it as a substance of support and healing for Emory as she endures immense suffering and strife.
Drama Club
The love of theater is at the heart of the novel; Thornton Wilder’s 1936 play Our Town was Kathleen Glasgow’s inspiration for the story. Set in three acts in the small town of Grovers Corners, the play is narrated by the stage manager who speaks directly to the audience and knows the history of the town and its residents, past, present, and future. Our Town appears early in the novel when Emory explains that her first text conversation with Gage was about his struggle reading the play and Emory often quotes her favorite line regarding her love of the stars. However, Emory doesn’t have a particular love of plays or theater outside of her reading and has never considered performing on stage. When Emory returns to school after the accident, her counselor encourages her to join the Drama Club for an extracurricular activity. Feeling impossibly alone yet with every eye at school on her, Emory reluctantly joins the club, and though she initially feels uncomfortable, the group soon becomes a therapeutic way for Emory to explore her emotions, making it a significant motif relating to The Hidden Lives of Teenagers Searching for Identity.
The Drama Club is not just a performing arts group but a community of passionate, creative people led by the enigmatic Mr. Stanley. However, the first time Emory performs on stage, she finds inhabiting a fictional persona immensely freeing and a way to safely exorcise her pent-up anger. Mr. Stanley explains the effect of being on stage: “They don’t see you, they see her. You aren’t here, you’re invisible. You’re invincible inside the skin of someone else’s story” (191). Drama Club allows Emory to reconnect with herself and with others. Working together on her scene aids in Emory and Liza’s reconciliation and Emory learns more about Jeremy Leonard, Luther’s younger brother, and how Luther’s addiction affects his life. Emory also gains a strong mentor and friend in Mr. Stanley who inspires her to explore her creativity on stage and later encourages her to go on living. Drama Club symbolizes Emory’s transformation into a more confident person through the art of self-expression on stage.
The Mill
The vacant textile mill, once a thriving source of economic wealth, haunts both the city of Mill Haven as well as the Ward family as it’s a nostalgic reminder of happier times. In the novel, the Mill symbolizes the mistakes of the past, the problems of the present, and the ability to reshape a new future. Founded by Emory’s distant relatives, the Mill provided jobs and prosperity for generations. When the Mill closed, the town was left with a polluted water supply and scores of unemployed citizens. Emory explains that “when the Mill closed, a part of the town died. The river was dead. It just sat there, for years and years, a ghost at the end of town” (373). In the present, for Joey and Emory, the Mill represents a burden and a reminder of their place in town as the resident “rich kids.” Trapped and suffocated by their parents’ expectations, the Mill reminds them of a life that they didn’t choose yet are forced to continue. For Joey, who can see the Mill from his attic room, the Mill is a monument to his failure to inhabit his parents’ dreams for success. For the citizens of Mill Haven, the area under Frost Bridge near the defunct Mill becomes a makeshift camp for those cast out of society. The Mill and its surrounding areas, once a flourishing area of nature combined with industrial power, now exemplify human weakness and failure.
By the end of the novel, the Mill becomes a symbol for a more hopeful future as Emory’s family learns that it isn’t an “empty place” but a structure full of people in need of empathy and help. Emory and her family channel their grief over Joey’s disappearance into aiding the people living inside the Mill and near the creek. Abigail Ward chooses to invest in the future of her community, not by selling to a real estate company to build luxury condominiums, but by donating the structure to a non-profit organization that intends to convert it into a multi-purpose rehabilitation center for people in recovery. Throughout the novel, the Mill represents both the decline of Mill Haven and its residents but, in the end, through the benevolence for which Emory calls, becomes a symbol of the town’s potential to offer hope and help to those in need.
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