Picture Me Gone

Picture Me Gone (2013), a work of realistic fiction for young adults by Meg Rosoff, is about twelve-year-old Mila, who follows her father on a trip from London to America to find his friend Matthew, whom her father claims is missing. Mila, excited to uncover the mystery of her father's missing friend, is ultimately heartbroken when she uncovers Matthew's deep sadness and the web of lies that her father told her to explain their trip across the Atlantic.

The story begins in London. Mila’s father Gil is a literary translator and her mother is a Swedish-Sudanese orchestra musician. Her parents have an unconventional relationship, never marrying and choosing to have a child late in life. Mila is their only child. Early in the novel, Rosoff introduces the reader to both of Mila's eccentric but loving parents, and her friend Caitlin, whose cruel parents give Mila some taste of what it means to live in a world of dishonest and troubled adults.

The action begins with a trip that Gil and Mila are planning to America, where Mila will meet Gil's best friend Matthew, his wife, Suzanne, and their baby, Gabriel. However, right before they depart for their trip, Suzanne calls to tell them that Matthew has gone missing. Gil and Mila wonder if they should continue with the trip, ultimately deciding that instead of a vacation, the trip will become a missing person investigation.



Once Gil and Mila reach America, they go on a drive from New York City to upstate New York, where the novel turns into a kind of travelogue. Mila narrates the hospitality of Americans and the strange experience of traveling the back roads. Suzanne, Matthew, and Gabriel live near the Canadian border. As they travel further and further north, Mila begins to learn more about the possible causes of Matthew's disappearance. The story involves infidelity and the death of a child; Mila begins to wonder what kind of person she and her father are looking for, exactly.

Once they arrive at Matthew and Suzanne's house, Mila sees clearly that the house is not one with much happiness in it. Mila suspects that Suzanne is having an affair; she learns about the death of Matthew and Suzanne's first son in a car accident, which happened when Matthew was driving the car. A semi crashed into the back of the family's sedan, and Owen, who was in the backseat at the time, was killed instantly. Matthew remained unharmed.

Gil and Mila move from Suzanne's house to Matthew's camp further north. There they find Matthew, his ex-girlfriend, Lynda, and their son, Jake, who is nearly the same age that Owen would have been had he lived. Jake's age reveals secrets about Matthew's past behavior that Mila finds appalling; she grows to dislike her father's friend more and more as gets to know him.



Throughout the novel, Mila prides herself on her keen observation skills – she believes that she is an asset to her father in the search for Matthew, and later it makes her particularly detailed in her descriptions of traveling through upstate New York. However, Mila's observational skills begin to become problematic once Mila meets Matthew and Suzanne. Mila notices things her father would definitely prefer she ignore, and as Mila learns more and more about Suzanne and Matthew, she begins to question her father as well. Though Mila trusted her father when they arrived, she soon learns that her father has been in touch with Matthew for their entire trip, and she begins to question that trust. Mila also begins to discover some of the darker parts of adult life, and how a person like Matthew, with a past checkered by pain and guilt, might not want to be found by anyone, especially not his own wife.

Ultimately, Picture Me Gone is a mystery and a coming of age story about the hardships that children face at the hands of adults, and also about the slow process of growing up and learning about the flaws of those we love.

Meg Rosoff is a young adult and children's author, best known for her first novel How I Live Now, a post-apocalyptic young adult novel set during the third world war in an imagined future Britain, which won the Guardian Prize, Printz Award, and the Branford Boase Award, among other honors. Rosoff, born in Boston, now lives permanently in the United Kingdom. Picture Me Gone, one of her more recent novels, was a finalist for the 2013 US National Book Award. Rosoff has won three lifetime achievement awards, including a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.