People We Meet on Vacation

Henry’s heroine, Poppy Wright, is short, outspoken, and eccentric, with extreme wanderlust. She has wavy, blonde hair and a preference for loud, patterned vintage clothing. Poppy feels self-conscious that she is less in shape than she was five years ago—when she was at the peak number of Instagram followers—and that her preference for orange makes her look like a “traffic cone” (345). The more social media-friendly description of her appearance is “tiny” with a style like a “1960s Parisian bread maker’s daughter bicycling through her village at dawn, shouting Bonjour, le monde whilst dolling out baguettes” (19).

These competing versions of Poppy—the “living advertisement” of metropolitan success and the awkward small-town runaway (17)—are also present in other aspects of her life. For example, her job at Rest + Relaxation magazine gets her the perks of a luxury lifestyle, while so meagerly paying her that she can only fund the most basic independent vacations. Similarly, Poppy, a college drop-out, has made a bold success of her writing through her use of social media, while at the same time carrying the shame of having run away from challenging situations.

Poppy’s personal journey is to strip back the many versions of herself and settle into the authentic self that is happy and at