How I Live Now

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).