We Are Okay

An empty dorm in December

The first thing to say about We Are Okay is that it starts in a building where nobody is. Marin is eighteen and a freshman at a college in upstate New York, and the novel opens during winter break, when the campus is empty and a snowstorm is sitting over it. She is alone in a dormitory room emptied of its other furniture, with a stack of books on the floor and no intention of going home.

She is waiting for Mabel, her best friend from California, who is flying in for a couple of days. They have not spoken since Marin left home in August, and Marin has spent the four months since answering nobody's calls, which is what she did instead of dealing with what happened. The novel's structure is built around that refusal: a present tense in a cold dorm, a past tense on the other side of the country, and two versions of Marin slowly arriving in the same frame.

The house by Ocean Beach

The house is in San Francisco, in the Sunset District near Ocean Beach, and Marin grew up there with her grandfather, whom everyone calls Gramps. Her mother died when Marin was almost three, in a surfing accident, and the account of it is spare and terrible: a gash on her head, lungs full of water, a hospital, and then nothing. Marin has no memory of her. What she has instead is a photograph on the hallway wall, jars of shells handed over by surfers who knew her mother, and a childhood built around the absence rather than around the person.

Her father was an Australian traveller who left before the pregnancy test. There is no name to put to him and no expectation of one, and Marin grows up as the only child of a woman she never met and a man she never had.

What she has of her mother is a town rather than a person. Marin is a fixture at the surf shop and on the sand, and the surfers there hand her shells without being asked, saying the kind of thing you say to a child whose mother you loved. Three large mason jars in her bedroom are full of them, gifts that arrive for years after there is anyone left to give them. Her mother's old friends wrap their arms around her and squint at her face as if trying to read something written there. Gramps never says any of this out loud. He does not have to. The town does the remembering for him, and Marin grows up half persuaded that the love in it is still aimed at her, which is its own kind of loneliness.

Gramps is the warm centre of that house and also its problem. He is funny, he plays cards, he cooks, he adores her. He also never once speaks to Marin about her mother. Instead there are the letters to Birdie, a pen pal he has written to for years, who sends him green dresses and birthday cards and letters full of a tenderness that looks a great deal like Marin's own. Birdie is the closest Marin gets to a mother, and Birdie is a fiction her grandfather wrote in two hands.

Then the signs accumulate. Gramps was in psychiatric care once, when Marin was small enough to visit him on a ward. He is paranoid at his card game, suspicious of his oldest friends, coughing blood into handkerchiefs he hides in the laundry. He gives Marin a lecture about the difference between romantic love and the kind of love he has for Birdie, and she hears something she has never heard from him before: that he would be lost without her.

One meeting at school makes the whole shape of the household visible. A counsellor asks Gramps whether he talks to Marin about her mother, and tells him that remembering the departed is the only way to heal. Gramps goes quiet and then venomous. He lost his wife at forty-six and his daughter at twenty-four, and he is not going to be instructed in the grieving of a granddaughter who is sitting right there. Marin, who has been sent to the meeting for missing class, realises that her grandfather's silence is not peace. It is a wound he has organised his life around, and she has been living inside it without knowing the terms.

June, and the two of them

The middle of the book is the summer before everything falls apart, and it is the best part of it.

Marin and Mabel have been friends since they were small, and that summer they cross a line together. It happens on the beach, at an unglamorous hour of the morning, after they have taken Gramps's whiskey and gone out to watch the surf. They kiss. They spend the night together in a way the book handles with restraint and real tenderness, and they tell nobody. Both of them know what this friendship is and neither of them can say it out loud yet.

Mabel is the warm one, funny and bossy and unafraid of saying the plain thing. Marin is the one who watches. The chapters set in California are full of the surfaces of that life: surfers who hand Marin shells and say her mother's name, a beach that is both paradise and the place where the worst thing happened, a teacher at school who tries to make Gramps talk about her mother, and the careful architecture of two teenagers keeping a secret from everyone who loves them.

The house gets strange that summer too. Gramps shows Marin a green dress he says Birdie sent him, and Marin takes it as proof of a correspondent rather than as proof of a man talking to himself. His friends come for cards and he watches one of them refill a glass with the fixed attention of someone checking for poison. Marin, who loves him, starts describing him to herself in careful terms, the way you describe weather. Then Mabel leaves for college, the summer ends, and Marin stands at the water trying to imagine her mother there. It is the loneliest page in the book.

August, and the boxes of letters

In August, Gramps goes out in the morning and does not come back. Marin leaves him eggs and a cup of tea, walks Ben's dog in the park, comes home, and finds the eggs untouched. She telephones his friends. She telephones Javier, Mabel's father. She cannot make herself open his study door. Then she takes the photograph of her mother off the wall, and on the back, in her grandfather's handwriting, it says Birdie on Ocean Beach, 1996. That gives her the courage to open the door.

The study is full of boxes, and every letter in them is in Gramps's own handwriting. The Birdie who writes to him warmly, in her own voice, is a woman he invented and signed on both sides for years, because his dead daughter was the person he could not stop talking to. In the bedroom closet there is a whole museum of her: her things, her clothes, photographs of her, photographs of Marin with her, all of it preserved and labelled and never once shown to the girl who grew up in that house.

Police arrive. Witnesses saw an old man go into the water at Ocean Beach, the beach Marin has spent her life trying not to look at. No body is ever found. Marin goes to the police station and then, instead of waiting for Ana and Javier, who are already waiting in the lobby, gets into a cab and goes to the airport. She flies to New York with her phone, her wallet and the photograph of her mother, lives in a motel until the dormitory opens, and then stops answering anyone.

What Mabel brings back

Mabel arrives in the middle of a snowstorm, and it takes most of the book to understand what she is doing there. She is not trying to fix Marin. She is refusing to leave without her.

The present-tense chapters are quiet and strange. The storm closes the campus and the two of them end up in the groundskeeper's cottage, which becomes the only warm room in the book. Marin talks about books. She is obsessed with Jane Eyre, with One Hundred Years of Solitude, with The Turn of the Screw, and she and Mabel use them as a way to talk about what they cannot talk about directly, which is one of the oldest and best moves in the novel. There are long silences. Marin does the thing she has always done, which is to arrange her face into something manageable. Mabel tells her about Jacob, the boyfriend she started seeing after Marin went quiet, and about the summer they were supposed to spend together in Nebraska that never happened, and about four months of assuming that Marin had simply left her.

Mabel is also honest in the way that irritates. She tells Marin that she should have come to the door, that she waited, that she was hurt, and Marin has to sit with the fact that her silence was not neutral. Grief had made her assume she was the only person in the world carrying anything, which is a very common mistake and the one the novel spends its best pages dismantling.

The past-tense chapters show what Mabel is pulling toward. The blood in the handkerchiefs. The eviction from a house of a secret that everyone had agreed to keep. The letters in his handwriting, written to a dead woman by a man who could not stop.

A small, deliberate ending

Here is where plenty of readers have their doubts, and the doubts deserve to be taken seriously.

The resolution is very small. Marin, alone in the dorm, takes stock and begins making the room hers: she moves her plant into a new pot, sets out her yellow bowls, hangs a paper chain of snowflakes that someone left behind for her. She telephones Jones, one of Gramps's friends, to ask about the house and the letters. Then Mabel comes back, this time with her parents, Ana and Javier, and a tree and a cooked dinner, because Ana has decided that Christmas is coming to Marin rather than Marin going home.

Ana tells Marin she has wanted to be her mother since they met. Marin says yes. The last thing the novel gives us is not an explanation of Gramps's death, which stays open, but a memory surfacing for the first time of being held by her mother as a toddler.

That is the whole ending, and it is smaller than the plot it closes. Some readers find it rushed, and there is a case for that: the decision to accept Ana arrives quickly, and you have to do some work to accept that a woman she has met a handful of times can be offered a place in the family so easily. I found it earned, mostly because LaCour spends the whole novel making one argument, which is that being someone's child is not a biological fact but a thing people do to each other, carefully, over time. Marin's mother chose her. Ana chooses her. Mabel chooses her. Gramps chose her in his own way, with his letters, and choosing her was the only way he had of loving her.

The title, in the end, is not a claim that the grief is over. It is a statement made by people who are not fine but who are together, and it is meant to be provisional. The phrase belongs to a household rather than a miracle: the sort of sentence people say to each other when they are not, and mean it anyway because someone else is listening. By the last pages it covers Marin and Mabel, Ana and Javier, and a dorm room with a tree in it, which is a small enough thing to be worth a whole book.

Who this book is for

We Are Okay is a young adult novel that behaves like a serious one. LaCour has said that the book grew out of her own experience of grief, and that the grandfather on the page is not her own.

It was recognised accordingly. It won the 2018 Michael L. Printz Award, TIME put it on its list of the hundred best young adult books of all time, and The Washington Post ranked it among the nine young adult novels of the last fifty years that changed the genre. Kirkus called it an elegantly crafted paean to the cleansing power of truth.

The audiobook, read by Jorjeana Marie, has done well too, and it suits a book that is mostly interior. School Library Journal gave it a starred review, noting that Marie's voice grows stronger along with Marin's.

If you want a plot that moves, this is not it, and the two timelines sometimes cover the same ground twice. If you have ever stopped answering the people who love you and then had to let them back in, it will be uncomfortably accurate. LaCour has said the book is a love story in the broadest sense, about the way people try and fail and try again at letting each other in, and on the evidence of the last twenty pages she is right.