What was I to do? We called his father to come pick him up, but by the time he arrived, my cousin had already left. After two weeks, he decided to go back to his user.

Many years ago, my husband and I picked up a distant cousin to stay out our house to help him detox off of meth. I was afraid of my loneliness and how I’d been tricked…I was afraid of the man I’d loved and how he had been a stranger. “Those days and nights at the motel, I thought I was afraid of his ghost.

In this scene, Marin has discovered that her grandfather has hidden something very precious from her: In this novel, LaCour not only exposes the reader to the trauma of Marin’s grief, but the many layers of it. In the last few years, however, I have exposed myself to grief, albeit second hand, whether through reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, or Jesym Ward’s article in Vanity Fair about the death of her husband, and as of late, Chimamda Adichie’s writings on the death of her parents (who died within months of each other). But both of my parents are still alive and so are my siblings. I had a miscarriage before my children were born. My grandparents passed away during my life, my uncle in the passed year. IntroductionĮven though I am approaching my middle age years, I have not yet had the experience of a great loss. Winner of the 2018 Michael Printz Award, We Are Okay, take the reader on a journey of loss, grief, friendship and how do deal with betrayal. It is during one of these flashbacks that Marin discovers a deep betrayal by her grandfather. As a narrator, Marin goes back and forth between the present in the cold New York winter, and her life before her grandfather passed. Mabel comes to visit Marin and LaCour shows the reader both the complexity of their relationship and the deep sadness that Marin feels. Marin is far from her California home, in New York, but has also completely severed ties with her dear friend, Mabel. His passing is worsened by the fact that she has lived with him her whole life, since her mother died in a surfing accident when she was a toddler. Have you ever lost someone close to you? In the novel, We Are Okay, by Nina LaCour, the narrator Marin is deep in grief over the death of her grandfather.

Alles okay by Nina LaCour