57 pages • 1 hour read
Emily HenryPeople We Meet on Vacation
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Vacation
The vacation is the overarching motif in the novel, featuring both as the annual Summer Trip Poppy takes with Alex, and the numerous other journeys she takes for work and with other boyfriends. While the Summer Trips take Poppy away from the life she has built in New York, connecting her with Alex and the more authentic version of herself, the ones she takes for work that make her life a permanent vacation are a distraction from the discomfort she feels when she sits still. She feels that on vacation she leaves behind the lonely girl she was in Linfield in favor of the worldly, adventurous woman she wishes to be. On vacation with Alex ten summers ago, Poppy decides, “this is what I want for the rest of my life. To see new places. To meet new people. To try new things. I don’t feel lost or out of place here” (95). While the novelty of new experiences in the moment is the vacation’s key attraction for Poppy, there is also the fact that away from home, she does not feel “lost or out of place […] there’s no Linfield to escape or long, boring classes to dread going back to” (95). In the vibrant present of the vacation, Poppy neither has to fear her painful past nor worry about the future responsibilities characteristic of adult life.
However, by the time that Poppy has made her reputation as an established travel writer at Rest + Relaxation magazine, the incessant novelty and escape from a fixed identity that vacations promise has become dull and lonely. She finds she does not have the energy to pitch exciting destinations to Swapna and the true source of her fun on vacation is Alex—the man who makes her feel at home in herself. Still, when Alex agrees to go on vacation with her to Palm Springs prior to his brother’s wedding, Poppy’s initial insistence on recreating the type of vacation they had before the fateful Croatia trip indicates she is still trying to escape reality.
It is only when that vacation ends with a hurt Alex stating they should not talk for a while that Poppy realizes her insistence on a vacation-dynamic is getting in the way of their happiness. For the first time, she sees the airport, that place that previously hummed with possibilities of adventure, as “the loneliest place in the world. All those people, parting ways, going off in their own directions, crossing paths with hundreds of people but never connecting” (317). She begins to dread a future without Alex, as a place of lonely expeditions where novelties will lose their meaning because she cannot share them with him. Poppy learns that to be happy, she will have to reassess her priorities and stop trying to escape.
Home
The concept of home is as much a motif as vacation. While vacations and escape are what Poppy seeks, home is the place she wishes to avoid. Home is a place of discomfort for Poppy, being resonant of a house cluttered with bric-a-brac and sickly animals, and headed by eccentric parents who her peers mock. Poppy reacts to a sense of unease and loneliness at home, in spite of her parents’ goodness, by putting off making a home of her own. She prefers the temporary shelters she encounters on vacation, filled with other people’s decor, to furnishing her own home. Embarrassed by her experiences of growing up “in a house filled to the brim with junk,” Poppy figures “it’s safer to err on the side of minimalism rather than hoarding” (24). She copies her ex-boyfriend Guillermo’s taste in sleek Danish furniture and avoids having plants and pets because she does not trust herself to keep them alive, as she subordinates her need for simple things to her cultivated identity as an unattached travel writer. It is only following the Palm Springs vacation and her determination to face her issues that Poppy starts to think about what she wants in a home. She recognizes home is a life with Alex, but also includes self-acceptance and peace with the past that troubled her.
Poppy’s childhood home, the conformist town of Linfield, is described as “the khakis of Midwestern cities” (50). Poppy’s dislike of khakis which “make a person look like they’re both pants less and void of a personality” (49) expresses her feelings towards Linfield, which is too bland and conservative for her and exposes the lonely, misfit self she wishes to escape. Alex maintains that Linfield was a great place to grow up even with his less-than-ideal home-life and is cheered by the fact that Poppy is also from there. Poppy, however, thinks “having the fact of the Linfields in common is sort of like having had the same cold: not the worst thing in the world, but nothing to high-five over” (33). Arguably, part of her initial rejection of Alex is tied to her rejection of Linfield. Paradoxically, part of her comfort with him is rooted in the fact that they come from the same place.
Even when Poppy recognizes that making a life with Alex is the only way she will ever be happy, she is terrified of his commitment to Linfield and a life in the town that made her feel so bad during her formative years. While Poppy’s lesson is to learn to accept Linfield as her home of origin and re-evaluate her experiences there, Alex must learn to have a more flexible attitude about where home can be for him. At the beginning of the Palm Springs vacation, he is tied to Linfield by his sense of responsibility to his emotionally fragile father and to the house he inherited from his grandmother Betty. He dutifully decides Linfield should be his home without taking his personal happiness into account. His gesture of testing out making a home in New York at the end of the novel is not only for Poppy’s benefit, but a means of personal growth.
The Photographic Image
The photographic image which appears on social media feeds and dating profiles is a recurrent motif in the novel. It symbolizes a simple illusion having little to do with complex reality. Poppy, an Instagram influencer, is a professional manipulator of images who knows how to take a flattering selfie and enviable vacation shots for work while joking about the images’ fakeness with her friend and fellow influencer Rachel. However, while Rachel and Poppy can feel superior in their ability to be emotionally detached from their social media posts, they are both aware that their livelihoods and privileges come from maintaining a certain marketable image. For example, Poppy’s knowledge that she has slacked on her social media posts and does not have the same influence she had two years ago means she cannot score a better hotel in Palm Springs when the accommodation fails. Once this illusion of photographic perfection is gone, Poppy is left with the harsh reality of a writer’s salary that is insufficient to fund a comfortable holiday. However, when she enters a relationship with Alex and steps away from the media image of herself as a glamorous travel-writer, she finds that she does not miss the associated perks too much, as the grounded happiness she is building is its own reward.
Alex, a teacher and fiction writer, is more of a Luddite when it comes to social media. Though he patiently snaps Poppy on vacation, he does not know how to use the flattering portrait mode and takes “truly terrible” pictures of her (9). However, these less filtered pictures also represent Poppy at her happiest, and she comes to treasure them over the more polished images.
When it comes to his own self-presentation, Alex is clueless about how to give the appropriate image-based cues to convince women on Tinder that he is dateable. He commits the obvious mistake of featuring a profile photograph of himself in a group of men, rendering him indistinguishable. He is also, in Poppy’s tactful words, unphotogenic, meaning he is “extremely handsome in real life […] but when one millisecond is captured […] sometimes you’re making a weird face” (184). Media-savvy Poppy’s harsh judgement of Alex’s ability to manipulate imagery parallels her initial dismissal of him for wearing khakis. Both of these first impressions are misleading, as Henry shows that images are unreliable in conveying reality, and the only way to fall in love with someone is to actually get to know them.
While Alex’s disinclination to manipulate imagery shows that he has deeper values, he is still susceptible to making snap judgements based on appearance. Alex has an idea of how his type of woman should look and present herself and dismisses anyone who does not conform to the image in his head. Given his need to maintain the illusion of control in life, Alex feels safer with the clean-cut, preppy Sarah Torval-type because she seems less likely to reject him and his plans for the future. Even when his lived experience is that Sarah has rejected him several times and he has more chemistry with a woman like Poppy, it is still difficult for him to let go of the idea of his type when seeking a Tinder match. Part of Alex’s character journey will be to let go of the rigid blueprint he has for his future happiness and to better trust his feelings and lived experiences.
Related Titles
By Emily Henry
