Anywhere With You opens with Charlie’s husband announcing that he’s leaving her while she’s drinking through a novelty penis straw. The penis straw is significant, the soon to be ex-husband really isn’t, except as a concept. Charlie and her sister, Lauren, grew up in a chaotic household with a father who seemed to like the idea of his family better than the reality of being a parent. He uprooted them, abandoned them, and then returned to repeat the cycle. Their mother seems to have gone along with the chaos. Charlie craves stability, predictably, and rootedness. She wants a boring job, a boring life, and a reliable husband, and that means she has refused to consider her best friend, Ethan, as a romantic partner. Even though they are clearly in love with each other. Clearly. Ethan is a musician whose former band hit it big with one song, now he travels around playing college campuses and making Van Life content.
Anywhere With You takes place over a few days, plus many flashbacks, as Charlie asks Ethan to help her get to her sister’s wedding, though not that she can be at the wedding, but so she can stop the wedding. Lauren and Peter have been off and on for years, and Charlie is convinced that she should save her sister from making a terrible mistake. It’s a childhood friends to lovers, roadtrip, only one bed romance.
I’m always going to side with the messy women who are 6 neuroses in a trench coat pretending to be an adult. Other readers are going to call them unlikable, and I’m going to be ready to fight for them in the Applebee’s parking lot. Charlie is a mess. Should her husband have left her? Absolutely. She had only shown him the version of herself that he would like, and when he got a glimpse of her true self, he couldn’t handle it. There’s an almost audible pop when Charlie finally pulls her head of the place she has stuffed it. She is so smart, and so dumb, and so relatable to anyone who has run down the wrong path in life to avoid being like their parents.
There were many things I liked a lot about Anywhere With You and one thing that bothered me. I do not know if this is a legitimate complaint or a sign that I am old, or maybe both. I don’t know. There were a couple of moments towards the end when Charlie, Ethan, Lauren and Pete, having worked through their conflicts, are happy. I felt like I was reading a description of an aspirational Instagram post through a Vaseline smeared lens. So, am I an old who doesn’t click with a younger aesthetic? Is it a moment where Ellie Palmer was using words to describe an aesthetic instead of grounded emotions to communicate a moment? I don’t know, either or both of those could be true.
One thing Ellie Palmer does quite well, here and in her debut, Four Weekends and a Funeral, is capture the tension between being the person you think you should be and wanting to be loved for the person you are.
I received this as an advance reader copy from G. P. Putnam’s Sons and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.