Kathleen Glasgow

Kathleen Glasgow writes young adult fiction about teenagers living through grief, addiction, self-harm, and unstable forms of home. A poet before she became a novelist, she brings spare, lyrical compression to scenes of crisis, often using fragmentary passages and direct, conversational language to keep the narrative close to a young person’s shifting perceptions. Her plots do not treat recovery as a clean reversal. They follow its routines, setbacks, negotiations, and dependence on other people, while giving equal attention to shame and practical survival. Girl in Pieces traces Charlie’s attempt to rebuild a life after self-harm and devastating losses. How to Make Friends with the Dark moves through foster care with Tiger after her mother’s death, widening private mourning into questions of kinship and belonging. In You’d Be Home Now, a sibling’s opioid addiction becomes both a family emergency and a public story imposed by a small town. Glasgow repeatedly examines the gap between those fixed labels and the complicated inner lives they conceal.