There’s Nothing Wrong With The Self You Are At Home

Emily Henry’s effervescent latest, People We Meet On Vacation, is the clever beach read you need this summer

If you left home — the first home, the childhood home — did you reshape yourself into someone that fit your new surroundings? Was there something about your old town, your old self, that you felt you desperately needed to escape? And now, years later, how do you feel looking back at that transition? Were you fair to the person you were, to the place and the people that raised you?

I wasn’t. There were things I needed to leave behind and things I needed to keep, but I was so intent on escaping my small Northern California town, a place I considered provincial and unsophisticated, that I tried repeatedly and in vain to fit myself into different shaped boxes, boxes that I considered better somehow. The people who stayed in that town, I thought, were tragic for being comfortable in the place where they grew up.

For some people, leaving home is a safety issue, but for a lot of us, it’s not our home that we’re escaping. It’s ourselves. This is one of the questions addressed in the beautiful, clever, funny rom com People We Meet On Vacation, Emily Henry’s follow-up to her hugely popular Beach Read.