How I Live Now

“What have I ever said that’s so riveting to anyone but myself? Shrinks don’t count. They listen for cash.”

The cynical tone of this quote creates a clearer sense of Daisy’s character and indicates that she harbors many insecurities and unresolved internal conflicts. Her offhand, contemptuous reference to “shrinks” also indicates that professional attempts to help her to improve her mental health have been largely unsuccessful.

“Do you ever think about dying? Edmond asked me, talking on a tangent. And I said Yes, all the time but mostly as a way of making other people feel guilty.”

This quote introduces the novel’s focus on The Presence of the Dead even as it highlights some of the psychological conflicts at work in Daisy’s mind. Her oblique admission that she destroys her own physical health as a way of retaliating against her family reveals the true depths of her emotional distress and disordered eating. The passage also demonstrates several hallmarks of Rosoff’s unique narrative style. Because it is devoid of quotation marks or commas, the dialogue blends into Daisy’s own thoughts, creating the sense that the entire novel is essentially a monologue of the girl’s private musings.

Some nights Edmond had to lock [Gin] in the barn if we wanted to be alone but secretly I felt desperate for her because I knew exactly how she felt.”

Here, Daisy identifies with the dog named Gin, whose desire to be close to Edmond mirrors the Daisy’s own desire; they both crave him with an animal intensity. In this context, Rosoff portrays Daisy’s incestuous relationship not as a rational decision, but as a base instinct that she cannot control. However, given that Daisy is a first-person narrator, her reliability on this point can be called into question.

“The flower gardens all around the house are so full of color that you couldn’t help feeling ecstatic and dizzy just looking at them.”

In this passage, Rosoff develops the setting by describing the vivid blooms that dominate the spring season. This strategic use of visual imagery establishes the garden as an important place for the characters and establishes a positive baseline that is later contrasted with Daisy’s fear of the garden as she faces Edmond’s unresolved anger and trauma after the war.

“From my point of view this made any doomsday scenario even harder to get my head around, especially having grown up in the Concrete Jungle, which possibly overstates the case given that the Upper West Side is fairly leafy, as concrete jungles go. But we’re still talking about a few nice trees here and there whereas in England I was drowning in fertility.”

This passage deliberately contrasts Aunt Penn’s garden and house with the hectic setting of New York City, and it is clear that Daisy prefers England, in part, because of the famous English gardens. By marveling that she is now “drowning in fertility” in England’s lush gardens, she articulates her dislike for urban living and the absence of true greenery in “the Concrete Jungle.”

“He made it extremely clear that the army was not in any mood to hang around watching some Female American National have a tantrum at this Vital Junction in History.”

This is another example of Rosoff’s idiosyncratic use of capitalization to convey the hyperbolic tone of Daisy’s teenage observations. By capitalizing key phrases that would normally remain lowercase, Daisy’s narration bestows particular emphasis upon these concepts, rendering them into caricatures.

“I said PIPER: I would have to be buried alive in a ditch and stamped on by elephants before I would ever think that being anywhere with you wasn’t a good thing SO THERE.”

Despite the puerile tone of this passage, Daisy’s declaration of love and devotion to her younger cousin indicates her growing emotional maturity, for she is essentially committing to the responsibility of staying with her cousin in any circumstances. This passage reinforces the sisterly bond between the two, and by using the emphatic conclusion, “SO THERE,” Daisy implies that there is simply nothing more that needs to be said on this particular topic, as her devotion will never waver.

“I’m generally not big on ghosts. Ouija boards and black cats are way down the list of neuroses I suffer from.”

Daisy’s casual, humorous reference to her “list of neuroses” indicates her long familiarity with the challenges that come from internal efforts to overcome the effects of mental health conditions. This comment also develops the theme of the presence of the dead, for although Daisy is skeptical of ghosts and the supernatural, she must nonetheless come to grips with her “haunting” psychic connection with Edmond.

“And eventually Piper said in an apologetic way that she was a little bit hungry and she went off to see what she could find and came back with half a loaf of bread which was about as easy to get hold of these days as a piece of the True Cross and she also had some cheesy stuff they called curd and it tasted pretty good.”

This passage advances the novel’s hunger and food symbolism and relies upon Christian imagery to convey the dire straits that the girls must navigate. Piper has a healthier relationship with food than Daisy, and feels a little guilty about this, just as she feels guilty for being hungry when food is hard to find. Additionally, Daisy’s casual reference to “the True Cross” illustrates the extreme deprivation that the girls now experience, and it also suggests the Christian-focused worldview that dominates their community at large.

“If you haven’t been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is No time at all.”

This quote develops The Complexities of Love in Wartime Relationships. As Daisy suggests, war causes people to lose what they consider to be the necessities of life, including people that they care about. This loss of love also foreshadows the fact that Edmond’s love for Daisy will become deeply damaged after he is traumatized by the massacre at Gateshead Farm.

“I was glad I was too thin to get my period because that would have pushed me over the edge.”

This passage advances the novel’s focus on the many different meanings of food and hunger. In this instance, the focus is purely practical and physical, for Daisy’s disordered eating has had profound effects on her body, even preventing her from menstruating. When she is traveling across the country with Piper, her body’s disordered functions ironically become an asset, ridding her of certain inconveniences that would hinder her journey.

“I wouldn’t have recognized a hazelnut if it tapped me on the shoulder and asked me how to get to Carnegie Hall.”

With Daisy’s flippant comment, Rosoff develops the protagonist’s habit of using humor to deal with the extremities of her situation, and the self-deprecating tone also shows that the protagonist is willing to admit her own ignorance and learn from others. Notably, she retains her sense of humor even while traveling cross-country on foot during a time of war. Furthermore, this quote suggests that her city upbringing has deprived her of many vital survival lessons.

“The path followed the river and after half a day of walking, the river forked off and checking the map we knew EXACTLY WHERE WE WERE for the first time since leaving Reston Bridge.”

This passage develops the symbolism of the river, which becomes a source of direction and hope when it leads Daisy and Piper to Gateshead Farm and to their home. Daisy also conveys her excitement about this with all caps, rather than with sophisticated or poetic diction, in keeping with the novel’s informal, teenage tone.

“Once when I went on a Five Boroughs Sponsored March against poverty or something, I walked twenty-two miles in one day and I wasn’t eating a lot more that day than this one.”

This is another reference to Daisy’s childhood in New York City; the five boroughs are Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. These areas are so distinct that other authors often turn them into characters in their own right. (A prime example can be found in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.) This quote from How I Live Now also emphasizes that Daisy’s disordered eating is born of her experiences with her judgmental stepmother in New York.

“There must have been thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of places in England that hadn’t been touched by the war: the bottoms of lakes, the tops of trees, the far corners of forgotten meadows; little remote corners where no one ever went in peacetime because the place wasn’t important enough or on the way to anything else or no one could be bothered to ruin it. The lambing barn was one of them.”

Because Daisy views the lambing barn as an idyllic place and as part of her true home, this passage touches upon The Process of Finding Home. While the sequestered house has been left in a state of disarray, the soldiers never discover the lambing barn, which remains pristine and almost becomes part of the natural landscape.

“I prayed that the food hadn’t all rotted in the summer heat. I prayed to all the gods I never believed in my whole entire life that there would be enough for Piper and maybe some left over for me. I guess this means I now have to believe in god.”

This passage describes Daisy finding the food that Isaac hid in the lambing barn. By this point, she has started to repair her relationship with food, and she craves it in a healthy way. Once again, her relationship with food is connected with Christian imagery, and in the context of this scene, the presence of food becomes miraculous: a reason for believing in a higher power rather than an impediment to being thin.

“I felt full of rage and despair, like Job shaking his fist at god, and all I could do was sit with her and stroke her hair and murmur enough, enough, because that’s what we’d both had.”

This is an allusion to the biblical Book of Job in the Old Testament. In this story, Job questions why he is born and why God would allow Satan to torment him. Satan gives Job physical pain, kills his family members, and destroys his food sources. Like Job (especially in the lack of food), Daisy is angry that innocent people like Piper are suffering. The comfort that Daisy offers Piper also develops the theme of the complexities of love in wartime relationships.

“There were days I would happily have traded the entire future of England for a single jar of mayonnaise but unfortunately the opportunity never arose.”

This quote demonstrates a significant change in Daisy’s character as she begins to actively desire specific foods. Her cross-country journey with Piper causes Daisy to stop wanting to starve herself, she is now comfortable admitting that she craves food. This shift indicates that even in amidst the deprivations of war, she finds opportunities to heal.

“I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.”

Daisy sometimes feels as though she is “haunting” the house while she and Piper live in the lambing barn, hoping to see Edmond return home. Additionally, Piper’s own sentiments enhance the novel’s focus on the presence of the dead, for she feels that the house is haunted by the living and dead soldiers that once lived there, and she avoids spending time in what used to be her home.

“I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.”

This quote is a memento mori, or an open acknowledgment that death comes for everyone and is a part of life. Daisy’s separation from Edmond represents the death of their old relationship; they will have to rebuild their love when they are finally reunited. The themes of the presence of the dead and the complexities of love in wartime relationships are both developed here.

“Nearly everyone got used to living without little luxuries like library books.”

When Daisy is forced to return to New York City, she takes a job at the public library in order to regain her own agency and arbitrarily claim a portion of ground for herself as part of the process of finding a home. However, this process will not be complete until she finds a way to return to England.

“I’m coming, I said silently to everything I’d left behind, and headed for the single, ragged bus that would take me home.”

This moment occurs near the end of Daisy’s process of finding a home. She knows that she wants to live in England rather than in New York, and it takes a week of traveling to make the journey to her true home, where her English family lives. This week comes after six years of closed borders.

“I turn sideways and look at his face, trace his scars with my finger and without speaking tell him again and again that I’m home.”

Daisy tries to physically, and repeatedly, convey that she will never again leave Edmond or her home in England. She wants to help Edmond process the trauma that has caused him to self-harm. This quote develops both the theme of the complexities of love in wartime relationships and the process of finding a home.