The People We Become

For the better part of a decade, Olivia has been managing everyone's experience of her. She has never once managed her own.She arrives in Los Angeles in January 2011 with a box, a suitcase, and a version of herself built to survive being watched. It works. It works so well that she stops noticing she is doing it: editing herself in real time, reading a room before she has even entered it, becoming whoever the moment requires. It works until the version of her built to survive starts costing her the thing she was trying to protect.What follows is a decade of becoming, unraveling, and becoming again, through a relationship that asks her to disappear, a recovery she does not choose so much as finally allow, and the slow, unglamorous work of learning to be a person instead of a performance of one.The People We Become is a novel about the parts of ourselves we build to get through, and what it costs to eventually let them rest. For readers of Sally Rooney, Megan Nolan, and anyone who has ever had to learn how to be useful before they learned how to be okay.