I AM HERE NOW

A Bronx teen comes of age in a dysfunctional family.

Set in 1960, Bottner’s verse novel explores the hardships endured by straight 15-year-old Maisie Meyers and her gay 11-year-old brother, Davy, who are repeatedly subjected to their mother’s violent physical and emotional outbursts and their father’s extended absences. First-person narrator Maisie, from a middle-class Hungarian Jewish American background, takes solace in the friendship of working-class Irish American neighbor Richie O’Neill, the son of a troubled Vietnam veteran prone—like Maisie’s mother—to erratic, abusive behavior. Maisie laments that she and Richie “have parents / who could compete to be / the most unhappily married people / in all of Parkchester” and, given the tense congestion of their urban neighborhood, concludes: “Nobody who lives in the Bronx can relax.” Bottner’s narrative of familial dysfunction probes Maisie’s development as she attempts to protect her brother in a house where “it’s always war” as she acts out, seeking from a boy the affection denied by a mother who “stands firmly against happiness, / as if it's a bad religion” and who makes no bones about telling her children they were mistakes. Packing numerous themes of evolving teen self-identity amid the cityscape of a broken home, this turbulent, plot-driven tale shows how a miserable home life transcends ethnic, historical, and socio-economic bounds.

Timeless lessons in how to find one’s self-worth in the face of parental abuse.