Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction

As a young child, Jarrett has a recurring nightmare about monsters swarming him. The only way to stop them is to stare them right in the eye, which makes them freeze. The problem is, this only works on one monster at once, and when they have Jarrett surrounded, he can’t stop them all at once. Inevitably, they get him in the end.

This insistent, recurring nightmare is a clear image of Jarrett’s predicament in a household where he can’t even count on his mother to be home when he wakes up, let alone to keep him safe in other ways—for instance, by not “making terrible decisions” like allowing strange and sometimes bloodstained men to hide out at her house (60). However, that the nightmares continue past the time when he’s living with Shirley suggests a deeper meaning, too.

Jarrett’s monsters certainly represent the frightening adults who are all around him, but they’re also a great image of a child desperately struggling for security and control that’s far beyond his power: Only by “keeping an eye” on the monsters can he freeze them, and there are far too many for one little kid to keep an eye on. The end of the book, in which Jarrett finally confronts some of the difficult adults in his life directly, also suggests that he did, at last, find a way to look all his monsters in the eye, and to “freeze” them here on the pages.