Someone We Know: A Novel

Content Warning: The source text contains a graphic description of murder, as well as instances of substance use disorder and sexuality.

In Someone We Know, Glenda and Olivia, both mothers of troubled teenage boys, recall a more idyllic time when their toddlers exemplified their brightest hopes for the future: “They used to sit around the wading pool, chatting and laughing, serene in the expectations that their kids would be bright and beautiful and untroubled” (101). In the present, 16-year-old Adam Newell struggles with substance use disorder, and Raleigh Sharpe compulsively breaks into neighbors’ homes to rifle through their computers. Both boys are angry, partly because they feel that the adults in their lives have let them down. Disillusionment with the adult world (particularly with one’s parents) is a defining trait of adolescence, as teens’ perceptions and world knowledge become more complex, and their romanticized notions about the adults in their lives suffer accordingly. If Glenda and Olivia were once “serene” in their starry-eyed expectations for their children, their sons looked up to them and their fathers with even greater admiration, as powerful, near-infallible paragons of nurturing, wisdom, and protection. Particularly troubling to many teens is the discovery of adult hypocrisy—the often furtive breaking of the very moral codes that these same grownups have enforced on them.