Growing up and finding Us: Emily Henry’s People we Meet on Vacation
Please be aware that this essay contains spoilers for the novel.
Similarly to Henry’s other romance title, Beach Read, the title People We Meet on Vacation is also a bit of a misdirection. It’s really not about travel, or about the people the heroine meets on her vacations. It’s, very eventually, about growing up and taking responsibility for how our actions affect others — and being vulnerable enough to take emotional risks for those we love. It’s also about treating the sorts of people we meet on vacation, or generally the people who we’d consider background characters to the story of our lives, as though they really matter.
Poppy is a writer for a travel magazine. Her whole life’s passion is supposed to be travel. However, she winds up questioning this passion in the novel’s first chapters, because she’s feeling unfulfilled at her job. The trip she proposes to her longtime travel buddy and former best friend Alex, who she hasn’t spoken with in two years, is all about recapturing the magic of their past adventures together and repairing a mysterious rift in their friendship. As Poppy says in the opening chapter, travel always has her feeling like a different version of herself, which is why she loves it so much. This is our first clue that travel as an experience of places really isn’t the main thing for her at all. However, for her job, this slight self-obsession is perfect- if one’s primary activity on vacation is documenting yourself for Instagram or a magazine, the point is not about showing the city alone, but yourself in that city having a great time.
Poppy doesn’t really act or think like someone who loves travel for its own sake. She doesn’t learn local phrases, spend any mental real-estate daydreaming about the place she’s about to visit, get excited over seeing certain locations, or even really pay attention to the contents of her own experiences while traveling. This novel certainly isn’t about travel as glamorous relaxing experience either: an inordinate number of things usually go wrong on Poppy’s trips. On this most recent one to Palm Springs, the thermostat in their AirBnb is cranked to 90 in the summer, the balcony is covered with a plastic tarp, and — oh no! There’s only one bed. But to Poppy, it doesn’t matter: she’s a trooper so long as Alex is with her. On an earlier trip to New Orleans conveyed through flashbacks, Poppy takes great delight in tourist shops which sell “thing 1” or “thing 2” t-shirts, because they enable her to have in-jokes with Alex. “Theme matters!” they cry, incomprehensibly to others, or “it speaks to me,” when about to make a nonsensical purchase. On her own in present-day Palm Springs, when Alex is sick and has to stay back at the hotel, Poppy’s a miserable bundle of nerves, too self-conscious to even look at art in a gallery without second guessing herself. Is she looking too long, or too briefly, at the pictures? What’s she supposed to be experiencing? She worries about the guards judging her for her inability to stare at the right pieces for the right amount of time far more than what she’s seeing.
As the above anecdotes indicate, the dynamic duo, at the start…are not always very likable individually or together? Certainly, one’s mileage may vary — I was not initially charmed. I could’ve done with some (any?) narrative framing about them being young and dumb on these early trips, or Poppy’s incapacitating self-consciousness being A Thing during the current one. I was left wondering, kind of uncharitably, if the author thinks it’s somehow a universal experience to be so self-obsessed you can’t make yourself look at art, or pay attention to the place you are spending thousands of dollars to experience. And those early trips described through flashbacks have some other pretty cringy moments. In New Orleans, 20-something Poppy pretends she and Alex are having a lover’s quarrel over an open mic during a karaoke night. She finds it hilarious that other people are perceptively uncomfortable. They are also super annoying during a group tour of a graveyard, asking repeatedly if things are haunted, which stresses out the tour guide, which they also find funny. On the Golden Gate bridge, Poppy makes the incredibly insensitive gesture of pretending to jump off for a laugh, to prompt Alex to pull her back.
When describing a perfect moment together in New Orleans, Poppy says that other people around her and Alex fade away like a backdrop. It is as though they are the only two people in the world. I understand feeling that way in a moment of magic shared with someone, but it’s never entirely true? There’s such a thing as social obligation to others, who are just as real as you are, even if they live in vacationland — which is only vacationland for you? It’s real life for them. You’re the side character in their personal narrative making an ass of themselves for no apparent reason.
But that actually is the meta-theme of this novel, and it creeps up on the reader despite not being foreshadowed at all in Poppy’s narration. The point is that you can’t live your life like it’s a vacation, even if vacationing is your literal job. You can’t treat other people like a backdrop to your life, starring you, and not have the consequences of that self-centering behaviour ever affect you. The story unfolds gradually to examine Poppy’s fragility around her identity and goals. This makes it possible for her to understand why she’s clung hard to travel as a measure of self-worth, and Alex’s status as a best friend but definitely not a partner.
Poppy and Alex have had this travel-based relationship because travel is the one area of life in which they can still make time for each other as friends. But it’s a bit difficult to reframe what they’re doing in ways that make sense to mature, 30-something people on the verge of marrying their partners, not single 20-somethings making idiots of themselves in travel destinations. For them, travel is primarily about being together, the vacations a place of total acceptance despite Alex and Poppy’s mutual weirdnesses and differences. It’s always been like this: during their early friendship, when carpool rides forced them into proximity for extended periods of time, they delighted in how opposite they were from one another while not ever feeling the need to impress each other. We see, in past flashbacks, other boyfriends rejecting Poppy for her weird, messy and over-the-top family. Alex is the one person in her life who’s seen all that and still likes her — she has no other longtime close friends. She can’t bear to lose him, which makes her incredibly hesitant to try to date him, because what if it goes badly and she loses him entirely?
It also seems evident that Poppy is drawn to travel, and to being an Internet Person (her words) who curates a social media presence, as a way of chasing after attention and acceptance after feeling lonely and inadequate her entire life. Poppy might be super twee and quirky, but she has real darkness and pain. I think she performs so hard for Alex on their early trips with attention-hogging and endless, quippy one-liners, because that’s how she perceives her self-worth — as only valuable when she’s putting on a show for someone, while her basic presence isn’t sufficient. She feels the need to make Alex laugh to reassure herself that he’s having a great time with her, that she means something to him, and that means she’s worth something in general. She’s desperate for that experience to the point of not caring about anything else on the trip. And that kind of reframes the annoyingness of the initial banter and hijinks in a new, heartbreaking context. Especially because Poppy confesses as much to Alex, that she feels inadequate: *“I feel broken too,” I tell him, my voice cracking into something thin and hoarse. “I’ve always felt like once someone sees me deep down, that’s it. There’s something ugly in there, or unlovable, and you’re the only person who’s ever made me feel like I’m okay.”*
The last 3/4 of the novel are a personal reckoning for Poppy, about the ways her selfishness in clinging to Alex as a friend for so long, sometimes to the exclusion of his ex-girlfriends, has hurt them and him, even if she didn’t intend to do so. Poppy has a really painful chance encounter with one of her high-school bullies on the MTA which prompts some self-reflection along these lines. In town for business, the former bully remembers Poppy from high school, gives her some half-assed apology for being mean to her, and then says some things about how she’s obviously doing so well now, so what he did didn’t affect her. She outright tells him she’s on her way to therapy and he jokes “not because of that shit I pulled…I hope.” But it kind of is because of his shit? She’s spent her life running from the hurt she experienced as a kid, where people were incredibly judgmental of her. She would’ve liked to believe she won by succeeding at life while this jerk remained stuck in Linfield, but here he is, doing just fine and traveling to NYC for business. The bully doesn’t want to hear how she really felt about him, of course, he just wants to believe Poppy’s okay now and feel like he’s a good person for apologizing. He wants forgiveness without really hearing what kind of impact his actions had on her.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Poppy has this unsatisfying exchange with the guy, is so upset that she cries, immediately determines that she’s quitting her job, and then arranges to travel to Linfield where she will grovel in front of not only Alex, but Alex’s ex-girlfriend Sarah as well. She specifically apologizes to Sarah for not recognizing her own feelings towards Alex, and allowing that denial of her feelings to hurt Sarah through her carelessness. “Sorry again. I hope you know it was always about me. Not you,” Poppy’s bully had said, as a parting shot to Poppy before stepping out of her life again. And isn’t that the point — the hurt Poppy experienced because of this guy was diminished to a lesson he had to learn about himself that he doesn’t perceive as affecting her. The message here is so subtle it’s almost subliminal — being a caring person means being accountable for the ways you’ve hurt people, even unintentionally, even when you were just clinging to what little you have, afraid of even that being taken away (as the bully explains his actions), even when they’re a minor character in the story of You.
So in the final scene, Poppy goes to find Alex, and grovels hard for the ways she’s let him down. In front of an audience of all his fellow teachers who are drinking at the Linfield watering hole, oh God, the poor man. She realizes that clinging to Alex as a friend has prevented him from fully committing to his partners, because he’s always prioritized her as his best friend. Out of her desire to not lose him, she’d kept him confined to one part of her life, fun vacation time that wasn’t real, but that was only out of fear of losing him. Her monologue goes on way too long (I say having written a thing that is way too long, I more than understand the tendency), and 50% of it probably could’ve been preparatory thoughts in Poppy’s head, with the rest being delivered as a speech, but still, it is incredibly moving. She’s brutally honest, painfully vulnerable, in a way I couldn’t have dreamed in the early chapters when I so longed for Poppy to stop performing continually and to just be genuine for a minute. This is so real it hurts. She tells Alex what she’s really been after, all this time, is love, in the ways that he specifically loves her, which come from a decade of them knowing each other and completely trusting each other. Their friendship has made it possible for them to finally be together, because they now understand what they want out of life and love, and they’re finally ready to begin to be together.
He rejects her, of course. But only because he’s a private person who needs to give his half of the confession of his love for her ears alone.
