Victim of Circumstance: The Agony of Being Thirteen

Yannick Murphy’s coming of age tale, Here They Come, is centered around an unnamed thirteen year old girl and her poor family living in New York City during the 1970’s. This story details the trivialities of being a teenager through the uncouth yet astute narrator. Through her eyes we see the flawed world that surrounds her; the old toothless hot dog vender who feels her up, her emotionally unstable brother with suicidal tendencies, her mother who falls asleep crying every night, and her father who lives comfortably with his girlfriend as his children and ex-wife starve. She seems aware that the world is not fair but her only way of expressing her emotions toward the injustices that she and her family face are through her rough language and irreverent actions. When a police officer disregards her request for help after her bike is stolen her response is to give the cop the finger.

The only escape the narrator gets from her monotonous (albeit, unusual) day-to-day activities happens when her father mysteriously disappears. Her brother (also unnamed) and their father’s girlfriend travel to Spain because they suspect that is where he has runaway. During this experience and, for the most part throughout the book, the narrator appears apathetic toward her family. She explains the things around her with a sense of detachment as if to say, “this is how things are and this is how things will always be.” When she is playing with her brother and their other sisters, the narrator mentions hearing that when you learn how to be a lifeguard, you must learn to not only save lives, but to be able to get the drowning person off of you and prevent them for bringing you down as well. This seems to serve as a metaphor for the family. They love each other and are capable of helping each other, but their own survival must come first. What may appear to be selfishness, is not necessarily so.

Murphy’s narrator brings a new perspective to the teenage girl of the 1970s. She is not discovering her burgeoning sexuality or going to the mall with her friends. The only sexual encounters that she engages in are the mild contacts with John, the hot dog vender, who touches her in exchange for chocolate and hot dogs. Her only friend lives with her drug-addicted mother and her Hells Angels boyfriend in an environment that seems comparable the narrator’s own unstable home life. The story functions not to show the ways of the world to young readers (in fact, this book does not appear to be aimed toward young readers) but rather it expresses what it’s like to grow up in a home that may have at one point been filled with hope and potential that has for whatever reason faded. But I think most importantly, it is a story about what it’s like to be a victim of circumstance. The narrator can’t help but being a thirteen-year-old girl and as a result she must fall victim to its restraints. She must suffer the indignity of being ignored and pushed aside because of the assumption that she is only a child incapable of being taken seriously and respected in an adult world. It is easy to empathize with Murphy’s narrator
because, regardless of financial situations and geographic locations, her narrator suffers the indignities of adolescence.