A Return Home Sparks a Familiar Longing In this Excerpt From How to Hide In Plain Sight

By Lacy Baugher Milas  |  August 28, 2024 | 1:00pm
Books Features Emma Noyes
A Return Home Sparks a Familiar Longing In this Excerpt From How to Hide In Plain Sight
Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

Turns out you can go home again. Sometimes. Maybe. We’re all, no matter where we call home now, inevitably products of the places we’ve lived, and the people who formed our lives there. Such is the case in How to Hide in Plain Sight, a story that explores the unbreakable bonds of family and love.

From Emma Noyes, the author of Guy’s Girl, How to Hide In Plain Sight follows the story of Eliot, the youngest of six siblings who is summoned home to Canada to attend her brother’s wedding. Though she has spent the past decade struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder, she finally feels as though she has her life—and her mental health—under control. But does she? Being thrust back into the whirlwind of her family and reuniting with her best friend (whom Eliot was more than a little bit in love with) has her wondering whether any of that is actually true.

Here’s how the publisher describes the story. 

On the day she arrives in Canada for her older brother’s wedding, Eliot Beck hasn’t seen her family in three years. Eliot adores her big, wacky, dysfunctional collection of siblings and in-laws, but there’s a reason she fled to Manhattan and buried herself in her work—and she’s not ready to share it with anyone. Not when speaking it aloud could send her back into the never-ending cycle of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that consumed her for years. 

Eliot thinks she’s prepared to survive the four-day-long wedding extravaganza—until she sees her best friend, Manuel, waiting for her at the marina and looking as handsome as ever. He was the person who, when they met as children, felt like finding the missing half of her soul. The person she tried so hard not to fall in love with… but did anyway. 

Manuel’s presence at the wedding threatens to undo the walls Eliot has built around herself. The fortress that keeps her okay. If she isn’t careful, by the end of this wedding, the whole castle might come crumbling down.

How to Hide In Plain Sight will hit shelves on September 10, but we’ve got a first look at the story for you right now. 

In the thirteen hours it took me to drive from New York City to Port Windfall, Ontario, I drank three cups of coffee, started four podcasts, engaged in countless lively debates with drivers who couldn’t hear me, and listened to every single one of my Spotify playlists. Twice.

When I ran out of background noise, I took reality and shaped it into copywriting templates. I do that sometimes.

HEADLINE: Disgraced Daughter Returns to Family’s Private Island for Four-Day “Wedding of the Century”

OFFER: Ready to face your demons, relish lavish excess, and suffer through nightly political diatribes, all while wearing a smile that says you’re having the time of your life?

CALL TO ACTION: Click for Free Trial!

When I tell people I’m a copywriter, most often they picture Mad Men: long rows of women in smart wool skirts pounding at type-writers, dodging the advances of male executives, locked out of the meetings where real decisions are made. You don’t need talent to be a copywriter. You just need to be able to type.

Let me tell you a secret: copy is far more than words on an advertisement. It’s everything. It’s everywhere. We copywriters are the engine that moves society forward. Without us, progress grinds to a halt. Instruction manuals are blank. Street signs don’t exist. Travel becomes impossible. No sentence comes from nothing, after all: from the saccharine Christmas message on the side of your soda to the screw u bro written on a bathroom stall; from the seat-back sign telling you life vest under seat to the greeting that welcomes you to a website. Even the highway sign telling you that you’re now leaving Ohio, bidding you farewell and asking that you come back soon. Do you ever think about who wrote those words? Of course not. Those words are not words to us, with authors and backstories and spellcheck. They’re background. They’re grass and trees, part of the landscape. emergency exit signs say emergency exit because that’s how it is. Car mirrors tell us that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear because they do. Because they always have. These words, these pillars of society—they weren’t written. They sprang into existence at the exact moment society needed them. Perhaps they were even created by God: And on the third day, God created the sun and the moon and the instruction manual for how to set up your Google Edge TPU™ Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.

Anyway.

My destination was Cradle Island: a mile-around private paradise purchased by my father during the coked-up height of his second marriage. He found it in a newspaper advertisement. island for sale! I imagine the ad said. excellent value! 100% surrounded by water!

The way Dad tells it, he almost flipped right past. But then he saw the bird’s-eye shot of Cradle Island at the bottom of the advertisement. And the island looked like a cradle. An abstract cradle. A cradle on drugs. My father was also on drugs. He found this coincidence so funny that he laughed until he cried.

Then he bought it.

That was a different lifetime. By the time I got into the car borrowed from one of my coworkers to travel from Brooklyn to Ontario, Dad was almost thirty years sober.

As was I. Recovered from my addictions, I mean. Not to drugs or alcohol—to other things. Thoughts, food, people, places. Oh, yes— you can be addicted to a place. It happened to me as a kid. Every year, in the middle of February—deep in the bowels of the Chicago winter—I started to crave Cradle Island. The sound of sparrows in the afternoon. Its curving beaches, peppered with cattails. In the first light of morning, when the lake turns to glass. It was the strangest feeling. More potent than desire for food. Because when you want ice cream or crispy, hot buttered bread, the feeling pools right atop your tongue, but when you want a place, it calls to you with every sense, sight and smell and touch and sound and, yes, even taste.

When I moved to New York, I cut all cravings out of my life. All of them. I had to. “No seas tonta,” Manuel would have said, waving a bottle of beer in my face. “Just have one.”

I gripped the steering wheel. Squeezed my eyes closed and open. Blinked his face from my memory. No. That was before. Before I took control of my life. Before I worked my schedule down to an exacting science, to a well-oiled machine that left no room for darker thoughts. Before I learned to ignore the siren call of my memories, their taunts, daring me to jump down, down, down, into that all-too-familiar place—a hole into which at times I fell accidentally and at others I climbed willingly, allowing the rest of the soil to tumble in after me, shutting off all oxygen and blotting out the sun. 

Excerpted from HOW TO HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT by Emma Noyes, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024.  It will be released on September 10, but you can pre-order it right now. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB

 
Join the discussion...