Home Theme Analysis

When 16-year-old Jessie’s Dad remarries, they move cross-country and start over in Los Angeles in her stepmother, Rachel’s, house, which is huge, entirely white, and impeccably kept. This experience forces Jessie to consider what it really means for someone to be home. For much of the novel, Jessie believes that moving back to Chicago will mean that she’s home again, but a surprise weekend trip to Chicago impresses upon her that this isn’t actually the case. Rather, she comes to realize that home is where someone feels safe, comfortable, and welcome—and that home doesn’t have to be a single place. Rather, one can make a home anywhere, and it’s other people that really make a place feel like home.

At the beginning of the novel, Jessie thinks often of her family’s old house in Chicago. In Jessie’s opinion, it has all the hallmarks of home: a dingy basement, family photos everywhere, and comfortable furniture. Most importantly, it was where she felt safe, loved, and wanted—and she never had to fear that she’d have to leave it. This all changed when Jessie’s mom died—and while Jessie’s physical address never changed in the two years after her mom’s death, her home nevertheless changed. Without her mom around, the household tasks and family dinners she used to take care of fell by the wayside. By the time Jessie and Dad move out to Los Angeles to live with Rachel, Jessie’s childhood house is already completely different from the house she grew up in. It lacks elements she deems essential—most importantly, her mother. Clearly, even before Jessie has to contend with a new life in Los Angeles, her house isn’t even the same home it was a few years ago. This suggests that the idea of home isn’t as simple or straightforward as Jessie might want it to be. It may have more to do with people and with emotion than with a particular house.

Once at Rachel’s, Jessie fixates on the trappings that make a house a home. In her mind, Rachel’s house isn’t a home—everything is too clean, too white, and too big. There are no family photos, no books, and no one cooks in the expansive kitchen since they have an assistant, Gloria, who feeds the family. Even Jessie’s bedroom barely reflects that she lives there, as it has abstract paintings on the walls that Jessie hates and expensive soap in her private bathroom that Jessie feels uncomfortable using. Because Jessie feels so uncomfortable in Rachel’s house, she believes even more strongly that home is in Chicago, not in California. Part of the problem certainly has to do with the fact that it is Rachel’s house in Jessie’s mind, not Rachel and Dad’s house—it may be where Jessie eats and sleeps, but she feels no ownership over it. The only thing she has in her room that is undeniably hers is a photograph of her and her mom, another clue that people, not addresses, make a home. A lot of Jessie’s discomfort also comes down to the fact that Dad and Rachel leave their children to their own devices once everyone is living under one roof. No one ever asks Jessie might make her feel better about living in California. She’s put in a guest room, not a room that she has the ability to decorate or make her own—and the novel shows that being made to feel like a guest likes this makes it so that someone never can feel at home.

Things begin to change for Jessie when Rachel buys her a plane ticket so she can go back to Chicago for a weekend and stay with her best friend, Scarlett. Jessie is thrilled—she can eat real pizza, enjoy a cold autumn, and hang out with people who make her feel normal—but she soon discovers that her time in Los Angeles has made it difficult, if not impossible, to feel at home in Chicago anymore. Jessie’s childhood home, for one, has a child’s bike in the driveway, a clear indicator that she no longer lives there and can’t even pretend that she does anymore. Then, there’s unexpected tension between Jessie and Scarlett—especially when Jessie gets drunk in Scarlett’s basement, which no longer feels as homey as it once did, now that Jessie knows that Scarlett and her new boyfriend make out on the futon that Jessie fantasized about sleeping on if she moved back. Jessie also realizes for the first time that all her classmates in Chicago have accents, which only further emphasizes how alien she now feels in her hometown. Later, as Jessie vomits in one of Scarlett’s bathrooms that she’s been using for years, she realizes that even though everything about the bathroom is familiar, none of it feels like home. Home is not in Chicago—especially when she’s fighting with Scarlett.

Making up with Scarlett begins to impress upon Jessie that SN, a virtual friend in Los Angeles, might be right: home is defined by people rather than by a place. Once Jessie and Scarlett are back on speaking terms again, it’s much easier for Jessie to feel comfortable—but she still doesn’t feel nearly the desire to stay as she thought she might. Home, Jessie has to admit, might not exist for her at all when neither the place she came from nor the place she currently sleeps feel appropriate or safe.

Though Jessie never feels entirely at home in California, she begins to feel more welcome when Rachel finally realizes how distressing and anxiety-inducing it must be for Jessie to sleep in a guest room. Rachel and Jessie might not be best friends by the end of the novel, but Rachel’s overture, combined with Jessie’s improving relationships with both Dad and her stepbrother, Theo, show again that home doesn’t stem from living in a particular house or part of the country. Rather, people are only able to feel at home when they’re comfortable with the people who live with them.