How I Live Now
60 pages • 2-hour read
Meg RosoffHow I Live Now
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Themes
The Process of Finding a Home
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of disordered eating, incest, wartime violence, violent death, self-harm, and graphic scenes of carnage.
Over the course of the novel, Daisy discovers where and how she wants to live. Because of her own mental health condition and her conflicts with her father and stepmother in New York City, she finds herself uprooted from her home when she is sent to rural England to live with her aunt and cousins. Notably, their house becomes her most cherished version of home, serving as an idealized baseline to which she tries to return once the war forces her and her cousins to relocate multiple times. This issue becomes even more intense when Daisy’s father forces her to move back to the US. Throughout her experiences, she always strives to reconnect with those who have offered her the most nurturing form of home: her English cousins.
In Daisy’s mind, New York is not a true home for her because she does not receive unconditional love there; instead, she must reckon with disapproval and judgment. By contrast, Edmond and Piper make Daisy feel at home almost immediately after she arrives in England, even declaring that Edmond is the one who first “took [her] home” (3). Before the beginning of the pair’s incestuous relationship, Daisy sees Edmond as a kind and loyal dog. However, the narrative soon reveals that he is the one who takes care of her, not the other way around. Piper also cares for Daisy in these early chapters, cooking for her and offering platonic physical affection. These kind gestures make Daisy happier than her father and stepmother ever did, and Aunt Penn’s house therefore becomes the truest form of home for her.
However, Daisy loses this idyllic home when the war escalates. The house is commandeered by soldiers, who force Daisy, Piper, Edmond, and Isaac to become exiles in their own community. When Daisy and Piper are sent to live with the McEvoy family, Piper asks “if this was where [they] were going to have to live now” (75). Her morose question highlights the fact that no other house, however adequate, can ever truly become akin to the home that they have known. This quote also acknowledges the title of the novel, How I Live Now, which also reappears as the last line of the book. “How they live” at this point makes them feel as though they are “people living someone else’s life” (82). Being forced to live with strangers causes them to lose some of their identity: the part that is bound to the concept of home.
After the death of Major McEvoy and the resulting escalation of tensions between the English and the unnamed enemy, Daisy and Piper set off on their own to find Edmond and Isaac, and at this point, the definition of “home” becomes purely abstract, for they can only take comfort and find a sense of home in each other’s love and presence. After many nights of sleeping in a tent, they are happy to have better forms of shelter, and the intensity of their deprivation is such that they gladly welcome a meager hut as a “happy home” (125). In this desperate context, home is defined merely as a place that offers shelter and basic physical comfort.
Eventually, they return to Aunt Penn’s house, their true home, but they soon realize that this home is not complete without Isaac and Edmond. Before the two boys return, Daisy is forced to go back to the US and it takes six years for the borders to reopen. In New York, she feels more bereft of a home that she ever has, entering a form of “limbo” and endlessly yearning “to come home” (170) to England. For Daisy, this liminal space is part of her struggle to return to the place that she considers to be heaven on earth: her home in England. Much of Rosoff’s novel focuses on Daisy’s gradual discovery of where her ideal home lies.
The Complexities of Love in Wartime Relationships
Throughout the novel, Rosoff explores the taboo against incest in her determination to depict alternative forms of love and connection during wartime. Daisy remains at the center of this thematic exploration, given that she experiences two different kinds of love throughout her wartime experiences: her platonic love for Piper and her incestuous relationship with Edmond, which are only possible due to the teenagers’ lack of supervision during the war. However, when Daisy’s father insists upon her return to the US this incestuous love is disrupted, and Daisy must wait a full six years before she can return to England and work to rebuild her love with the traumatized Edmond.
In a sharp contrast to this taboo romance, Daisy’s platonic, sisterly affection for Piper blossoms over the course of their shared wartime experiences as they find themselves cut off from Edmond and Isaac. Daisy reflects that she “love[s] Piper in a protective kind of way” (80), and this sentiment allows her to gain a newfound sense of emotional maturity as she takes on the responsibility of keeping her young cousin safe. Because Daisy began life as an only child and has never before been in a romantic relationship, her romantic love for Edmond and her platonic love for Piper are both novel to her, and these connections become so much a part of her new sense of identity that they completely transform her life.
The deep, heartfelt connection between the two girls is designed to mitigate and soften the novel’s focus on Daisy and Edmond’s forbidden lust for one another—an aspect of the text that the author strives to normalize despite its taboo nature in most modern societies. Because Daisy equates her lust for Edmond to a form of hunger, the problematic, fundamentally “disordered” relationship gains implicit ties to her habit of disordered eating. However, Rosoff also presents the relationship as an escape from a world that has been turned upside-down by war. Because all social norms have been destroyed, Daisy and Edmond feel no need to observe the behavioral restrictions that they would otherwise have been forced to uphold. They therefore “[climb] inside each other for comfort and oblivion and […] [dream] a single dream” (67) of being the only ones present in the world. Their physical intimacy provides them with a sense of connection and escape that they desperately need.
However, even this problematic form of love is complicated when their psychic bond is shattered by wartime trauma and long separation. Forced to submit to her father’s control and isolated from Edmond for six years, Daisy eventually discovers that Edmond’s ability to love her has been greatly altered in the aftermath of the massacre at Gateshead Farm. In the end, Daisy has to help Edmond heal so that he can learn to love again. By contrast, Piper and Daisy pick up right where they left off; unlike the romance between Daisy and Edmond, Daisy’s connection with Piper is ultimately strengthened both because of and in spite of the war.
The Presence of the Dead
A recurring theme in How I Live Now involves hauntology, or the moments when thoughts of the dead persist in the minds of the living, affecting their emotional state. Before the war, Daisy is haunted by the idea of her mother, who died during childbirth. Later, when the war takes the life of Aunt Penn, Daisy and her cousins must persist in their guardian’s absence, haunted by the constant reminders of the way life used to be. Seeing the corpses left behind at Gateshead Farm also haunts Piper and Daisy. However, these deaths more profoundly affect Edmond, who was part of the farm community and was forced to watch the massacre.
Although Aunt Penn serves as a maternal figure and works to resolve Daisy’s unresolved sorrow about her own mother’s death, the woman dies while trying to return to England, orphaning her four children. Although she is largely absent from the novel, her ghostly presence lingers in the house that serves her children and her niece as a vital source of love, comfort, and safety. Notably, Edmond gains psychic awareness of his mother’s death before it happens. When he hears that Aunt Penn is trying to come home, his “face looked very pale” (32), and this detail foreshadows the fact that he and his family will lose Aunt Penn and will not learn about her death for many months. This early example of the harmful effects of his psychic gifts also foreshadows his deep trauma at the novel’s conclusion: a condition brought about by his reaction to the massacre at Gateshead Farm.
In many ways, this massacre becomes central to the teenagers’ experiences, affecting them all in profound ways. Although Daisy and Piper are not present, they hear the massacre at Gateshead Farm from a distance, and the distress in the screaming voices haunts them even before they witness the carnage of the aftermath. Upon seeing the bodies, Daisy describes the visceral sense of the violent scene, stating”
Dead things everywhere and when the stink hit you it was like nothing you ever smelled before and when you hear people say something smells like death trust them because that’s the only way to describe what it smells like, putrid and rotting and so foul your stomach tries to vault out through your throat and if your brain has any sense it wants to jump out of your skull and run away as fast as possible. (140-141)
With this deliberate run-on sentence, Rosoff vividly portrays Daisy’s inner turmoil and near-panic as she staggers beneath the sensory and emotional onslaught of the scene before her. Her senses are overwhelmed, and presence of the dead compels her to retch and disassociate. She is especially haunted by the sight of Dr. Jameson’s corpse because she once talked to him personally, unlike the other people at the farm.
However, Daisy and Piper’s trauma is not as intense or as long-lasting as Edmond’s because he loses people whom he knew for many months. Despite having the premonition about the massacre, Edmond felt that leaving the farm was tantamount to “abandon[ing] all those people to certain death” (188). His survivor’s guilt leads to self-harm and causes him to lose faith in his own psychic powers and in love itself. As the narrative explains, Edmond remains so deeply haunted by the dead that he does not “know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world […]. He turned it on himself” (193). Daisy’s life therefore becomes focused on helping him to vanquish his ghosts and heal.
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