68 pages • 2 hours read
Jarrett KrosoczkaHey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Jarrett J. Krosoczka
Jarrett is both the author and the protagonist of this memoir. He grows up from a sensitive kid to a normal teenager struggling with the abnormality of his background.
As a child, Jarrett is both sweet and troubled. He has frequent horrific nightmares of monsters and betrayals, which emerge from the frightening unreliability of his mother and the violent tempers of his grandparents. However, he’s also a sweet, regular kid who loves Disneyland and playing with trucks. He learns to value loving behavior over blood ties: His grandmother, he decides in the end, is more of a mother to him than his biological mom Leslie ever was.
The constant note in his personality is his love of art. All through the story, Jarrett learns to be the artist who will draw the narrative he’s currently telling in Hey, Kiddo. As he describes it, “When I was a kid, I’d draw to get attention from my family. In junior high, I drew to impress my friends. But now that I am in my teens, I fill sketchbooks just to deal with life. To survive” (214-16). In every chapter, he shows a little bit of his journey toward his career as a comics artist, from trading cartoons with Leslie while she’s in halfway houses to studying in a middle-school comics class to first getting a cartoon published in the paper. He also shows himself learning to trust his own artistic style, and in the process to express and work through his deeper and more difficult feelings about his life. Comics, to Jarrett, are a lifeline, a way of making sense of the darkness and sadness in his past. His autobiography stands as proof of the power of art.
Joe
Joe is Jarrett’s grandfather. He’s a canny old man with an irrepressible sense of humor and an abiding Depression-era work ethic. It’s he who first pushes for Jarrett to move from his chaotic childhood home with Leslie to the relative stability of the Krosoczka home. In spite of his occasional brusqueness, his fights with Shirley, and an overfondness for alcohol, Joe is a sensitive father figure to Jarrett, paying attention to his needs and likes and supporting his interest in art, even suggesting that he take art classes: “Doesn’t matter how much it costs or what day it’s on—we’ll get you there” (145).
Joe’s relationship with his wife Shirley is fraught; the two often fight (and the story hints that they used to fight violently), but they also share a sense of humor, and by the end of Jarrett’s story they’ve been together for 45 years. Joe was Jarrett’s most stable influence, and Krosoczka’s depiction of him lingers lovingly on his goofy jokes and his kindness. Joe’s legacy even appears in the style of the book: Krosoczka takes the only accent color, a sort of burnt orange, from Joe’s favorite dapper pocket square.
Shirley
Shirley is Jarrett’s grandmother. She’s a force of nature: Foul-mouthed and funny, she often terrifies Jarrett but never wavers in her care for him. Shirley’s strong opinions and lack of filter sometimes drive her children away from her; her reactions to her young daughters falling pregnant are terrifying and abusive. She delivers her judgments without waiting for more information: Her immediate response to learning that Richard has sent Jarrett an apology is, “He’s a bullshit artist” (245). However, she also has a huge heart and falls immediately in love with her grandchildren when they arrive.
Like Joe, Shirley sometimes drinks more than is good for her, and her anger emerges even more clearly then; Jarrett remembers her breaking her arm on the stairs after a drunken argument. Jarrett remembers her fondly for her humor, her powerful love for him, and the sheer vibrant intensity of her character: He often depicts her swearing her favorite oath, “Jesus Mary and Joseph!”
Leslie
Jarrett struggles with his birth mother Leslie both as a presence and an absence. After having Jarrett as a teenager, Leslie fell deeper and deeper into a heroin addiction that had started when she was 13; her struggles led her to steal from her family and to neglect the young Jarrett.
Leslie is a talented artist, and loves Jarrett better than she can provide for him. While she’s in prison or in and out of halfway houses, she writes Jarrett many letters, and the cartoon drawings they exchange are one of Jarrett’s first intimations of his future career. The story is sympathetic to Leslie, often depicting her struggles as a pregnant, addicted teenager abandoned by her baby’s father. The adult Leslie whom teenage Jarrett comes to know also wants more affection and connection from Jarrett than Jarrett feels she has a right to expect.
Jarrett’s struggle with the place Leslie holds in his life forms one of the major arcs of the book. By the time he’s a teenager, he can’t really feel that she’s his mother—she’s missed too much of his life for that. He also loves her, and when she gets out of jail for a longer spell and starts a life with a new boyfriend, he touchingly worries for her. In the end, Leslie’s struggles keep her in a sort of perpetual tragic childhood: Even her young son is more of an adult than she is.
